Post in Process of Writing
This article is currently in writing, thank you for your interest, but please dont rush me, i will panic >~<
Machine Translation This article is written with some of its sources were translated through machine translation. please be wary of any historical and contextual disrepancy. Articles will be updated if needed.
Toshiba, Typewriters, Computers Published 31st of August 2024
Toshiba Dynabook R82/A, Featuring amel's practice drawing.
This post originally named "An Overview to Dynabook" has changed its name as its content direction has also changed.
The idea of this post starts with talking about a peculiar short story of Kawasaki Typewriter, being bought by toshiba. but it has become more of it. this is why when your thought, and data are freeflowing. you will keep finding another node to the story until... well you see in this article...
After all i plan to make this article as an ode to the tablet that i bought for a very cheap price, eventhough its second hand. but instead, we are exploring the History of Toshiba Computer, and its demise around 35 years later.
But i feel like this post will be more than me reviewing the tablet that i just bought used, as i also show things that i have done with it. yet actually as i'm writing this article right now (15/08), i have not yet received the device. so instead lets look into what dynabook is.
Toshiba 1400K, a rotary typewriter from ~1954, one of the last rotary-style typewriters made in Japan
Unfortunately there is nothing much can be said for this Kabushiki Kaisha. other than that it was established in 9th of september 1954. and bought by Tokyo Shibaura Electric in May 1958, just four years after its established.
However, digging through some japanese webite, especially one called Shibusawa Shashi - or Company history that seems to be related to Shibusawa Eiichi, which as it turns out have a lot of history dating back to Meiji 23(1890). however just like in the wikipedia, this website also only mentions that on 30th of april Kawasaki Typewriter Co. Ltd becomes subsidiary of toshiba and called "Toshiba Typewriter Co. Ltd."
Whilst the date discrepancy makes me wonder if the typewriter company is didn't end up creating their own typewriters, and instead selling imported typewriters. it feels kind of weird because its not until 1978 Toshiba developed its first japanese word-processor as per their company history and IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan). now i'm not saying its impossible to make but... a lot of east asian typewriter tend to be very overengineered due to its complicated system of writings. However JW-10 as IPSJ described seems to have many modern features of Japanese IME at that time, in 1978.
As someone who is reading all this from faraway land, i feel like Kawasaki Typewriter has seen as nothing much but a footnote in japanese manufacturing history. i really wish some new information to be recovered for this seemingly humble company before being sold, or acquired by larger merger of Tokyo Electric and Shibaura Engineering. because while we can find everything about GE, IBM, and many western-based technology companies. there's barely anything existed for Japanese or East Asian ones except for the major companies where they have the time and funds to organise and maybe even translate the documents to english, and that feels like an injustice. for what its worth, history is history. Even if its just a typewriter company.
Don't get me wrong though, sites like shibusawa sashi has been a golden place to find a detalied chronology of toshiba. without it i wouldn't even realise that Toshiba is an abbreviation, and that its a merger between Tokyo Electric and Shibusawa Engineering Company - not that i know any of them until this 2:34 am (16/08) in the early morning when i typed all of this.
Just like any other companies that are being bought. Toshiba changes its name from Kawasaki Typewriter to Toshiba Typewriter and actually build quite a few notable typewriters that are rotary-style. because japanese writing system at that time, at least for official use are still using kanji. its not until 1955 they move along with what they call 'western-style' typewriters.
unfortunately there is no image archive of these japanese 'western-style' typewriters so i am myself wondering how it would look like and how it would work with 48-keys, which said to use kana characters, which kana of they meant is also a question unanswered, but we need to get going because a few years later toshiba, now entering mainframe computer business would change their name to...
Toshiba Business Machine ... yeah, TBM. seems to be very inspired of the big blue. of course the commin contender of mainframes and word processors are there, in fact Toshiba is among the first company to sell a japanese Word processor.
The toshiba JW-10 is the first commercially available word processor, first announced in september 1978 and shipped on february the next year. it uses toshiba's microcomputer TOSBAC-40L as its main processor and can hold maximum of 80,000 words for the purpose of kana-kanji conversion, a process that is notoriously hard to do until a method of sentence context and use frequency that later called "Phase designation input" is adopted, and likely to remain used in modern japanese Input Method (IME). later on it also have second iteration that was able to also do teletype and also a cheaper mass-market version called JW-5 was also introduced.
interestingly under this name, Toshiba also seem to produce a few calculators under the brand "Homeland" which seems to be just a product line instead of a full-blown brand. as i quote from a japanese website dedicated to calculators, Dentaku Museum (電卓博物館)
Early Toshiba calculators included the BC series and the Homeland series, with the BC series labelled as "Tokyo Shibaura" while the Homeland series was labelled as "Toshiba Business Machine".
however, we are once again have to get on, as the name change didn't stop here. The company once again going through another name change in October 1984 to Toshiba Information Equipment. This name lasts for 32 years, and will forever be remembered as golden days of Toshiba computers, domestically, and internationally. As many of their line up released within this years, and most success of them are on laptops and sub-notebooks like Libretto lineup of computers.
Lets elaborate a little bit though, as in this era, toshiba actually begins abroad with Toshiba T1000 Portable Computer. But domestically, toshiba actually have a different brand called 'PASOPIA', this is a 8-bit propietary computer that they released in 1981. with its first type PA7010 seen as being unable to gain any popularity and becomes a typical minor machine. this pasopia is also sold in the US as T100.
Now whilst earlier PASOPIA is an 8-bit computer, this one is... also 8-bit, the difference? its MSX and called "PASOPIA IQ". MSX are seen as budget computer for hobbyist, and possibly home users who just learned, or want to learn DOS as used on their business computers at the office. things like serial ports were rarely included on MSX devices, although for a few models of Pasopia IQ, it is included.
We should get on again though, this article is getting longer and longer it might as well be a novel. so here's a checkpoint. get yourself some drink and a breather, maybe a snack. and now, lets get on to it.
As we have covered earlier, eventhough they are not very new in the industry, they are definitely lagging behind their competitors, especially IBM and Compaq. its not until april 1985, just few months after they change the name to Toshiba-IE. they released the Toshiba T1100. one of the very first transportable computers. running MS-DOS 2.11 with intel 80C88 as its main brain. its also one of few machines that uses 3.5" floppies right away, to make its footprint as small as possible.
It was sold in EU and US First, and not until T3100 was released, that they finally also released the laptop for japanese market in 1986 under different series name as "J-3100". even had a special version of the same machine called J3100SS which released in 1989. the difference being it is less than 3kg, and having the width/height dimension of an A4 paper.
toshiba sold its stock to sharp and the company name changes to Dynabook inc.
What remains of dynabook and what it means to be independent technology company
- will be written separately, but in short
- it is very much what expected for a fanless intel-based tablet
- the stylus is nice to use for drawing
- the performance is... enough, if you need it for drawing and writing, not multimedia
- for its price, its a lot more worth it than other tablets with android/ios, or even surface, if what you are doing is not multimedia stuff.