A Lot Smaller, And Lighter
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday February 19, 1990
IT ALL began with luggables - essentially desktop machines with a handle on them. They were followed by the portables, which still cut blood circulation in your rectus femoris when you tried to work with them on your lap. Finally came the laptops. They were light enough (usually less than 10 kilos) to establish the viability of portable personal computing.
On the ascendancy now is the fourth generation: the notebook-sized laptops, which aim to fit within the borders of an A4 page, and are light enough to make computing on the move truly convenient.
Toshiba, Compaq and NEC lead the industry in development of notebook machines. The first success, Toshiba's Dynabook, was released for the Japanese market in the middle of last year, and was a best-seller. Last October, Toshiba released the Dynabook's international version, the T1000SE. This week, Toshiba is about to release in Australia its successor, the T1000XE, and a more powerful 80286-based version, T1200XE.
According to American reports, it seems that the 80C86-based T1000XE is basically the same machine as its predecessor, except that it now comes with a hard disk. This should turn it into a more practical computer.
The T1000SE is an enormously stylish machine. It has one of the best laptop LCD screens and a host of unique features such as the AutoResume function that returns you to the same spot in the application after you've switched the computer back on. But having only one 3.5-inch 1.44-mebabyte floppy drive and no hard disk severely restricts the applications that a user can run comfortably on it. With a hard disk, the package is closer to perfection.
Because the second machine, the T1200XE, is based on an 80286 chip, it has the minimum-size processor needed to run most of today's powerful, full-featured programs.
More details on Toshiba's newest machines next week.
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald
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