Toshiba T1200

Toshiba T1200
	Toshiba T1200
Operating system	MS-DOS 3.3
CPU	Intel 80C86, 4.77 or 9.54 Mhz switchable
Memory	1 MB
Storage	20 MB harddrive; internal 3,5" floppy drive, 720 kb; external 5,25" floppy drive, 360 kb
Display	Graphic mode: 640×200; Textmode: 80×25
Touchpad	83 keys, QWERTY
Weight	4.1kg

The Toshiba T1200 was a laptop manufactured by the Toshiba Corporation, first made in 1987. It was an upgraded version of the Toshiba T1100 Plus.

It was equipped with an Intel 80C86 processor at 9.54 MHz, 1MB RAM of which 384kB could be used for LIM EMS or as a RAMdisk, CGA graphics card, one 720kB 3.5" floppy drive and one 20MB hard drive (Some models had two floppy drives.) MS-DOS 3.30 was included with the laptop. It was the first laptop with a swappable battery pack. Its original price was $6499.

The T1200's hard drive had an unusual 26-pin interface made by JVC, incompatible with ST506/412 or ATA interfaces. Floppy drives were connected using similar 26-pin connectors. The computer had many unique functions, such as Hard RAM - a small part of RAM was battery-backed and could be used as non-volatile hard drive. Another function allowed to suspend the system or power control the hard drive (which was still dependent on the hard disk's on/off switch).

The Toshiba T1200xe is a later model of this laptop. It had a 12 MHz 80C286 processor and a 20MB hard disk drive. It also had 1MB of RAM expandable to 5MB.

Users

In the mid-1980s, some court reporters were early adopters of computers for automating the transcribing of phonetic-based stenotype to standard English paper transcripts.