Toshiba T-200: Reliable hardware is not enough

Long before Toshiba had the "Hello Tosh, Got a Toshiba?" line with its laptops and a couple of years before it joined the <a href="az_personal_computers_1984-10_004">Microsoft-backed MSX attempt to set a new standard in hardware</a> comes this advert for the T-200, a moniker which predates the naming scheme for cyborgs in the Terminator franchise by a couple of years[source: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_%28character%29#Character_nomenclature].

The T-200 was an Intel 8050-based machine running CP/M, which copied its 32K ROM-based "Toshiba Business BASIC" in to RAM at start-up to improve performance[source: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=232], leaving 32K for the user. 

It had an 80x24 screen, 560K of disk in the form of two double-sided double-density drives and came with an 80-character 125 cps dot-matrix printer. 

It was launched in the UK by re-seller Office International at the International Business Show on the 20th October 1981 and initially retailed for £2,995 ([[2995|1981]] in [[now]]), which compared well against other similar-specced machines such as the Intertec SuperBrain[source: "Toshiba launch", PCW, November 1981, p. 64].

Although it looks a little like a luggable such as 1978's <a href="adve_082">IMSAI PCS-80/30</a> or the more contemporary <a href="micro_decision_1982-05_001a">Osborne 1</a> from 1982, it was bigger than it looks in the advert and weighed in at somewhere between 15kg and 30kg, which made it a hefty blob of hardware. 

Apparently the coming of the all-conquering IBM PC rendered this machine, and many others, obsolete, although Toshiba did try again with <a href="az_personal_computers_1984-10_004">its MSX computer</a> a couple of years later, before really finding its feet as a laptop manufacturer in the 1990s.

