Monday, June 29, 2015

Toshiba Tecra 730CDT



The Toshiba Tecra (dynabook TECRA in Japan) is series of business laptops manufactured by Toshiba. The Tecra series includes four notebook models. This model, the Toshiba Tecra 730CDT was a great portable system for its time in 1996. 


My interest in this particular model is for a computer that runs natively with Windows 95 and MS-DOS. Also a 9-Pin Serial (16550 UART compliant) and 25-Pin Parallel (8 bit ECP) port are necessary for my needs. 



This laptop was purchased on eBay and it came with a copy of Widows 95 installed, but I decided I would start with a fresh install and load Windows 98 instead. By doing this, I was able to avoid reinstalling sound and other drivers (here is the official Toshiba site where the drivers for this model can be found http://support.toshiba.com/support/modelHome?freeText=1073769796  )  All the necessary drivers for this computer were loaded automatically by Windows 98 SE.


Here are the basic specs:

Processor:   Pentium 150 MHz  
Installed Memory:   16 MB (EDO RAM) This unit has 48 MB!
Hard Drive:   2.1 GB IDE  
Display:  12.1 in. TFT Active Matrix  
Operating System:  Microsoft Windows 95  
Motherboard Bus Speed:  60 MHz  
Memory: Installed RAM  16 MB  
RAM Technology  EDO RAM  
Max Supported RAM  144 MB  
Installed Cache Memory  256 KB  
Hard Drive Capacity  2.1 GB  
Display Color Support  16-bit (64K colors)  
Display Max. Resolution  1024 x 768  
Video: Installed Video Memory  2 MB 
Manufacturer: Toshiba
Date: 1996

Here's an advertisement from a 1997 copy of PC World:


Quite an expensive investment during the time. $5599.79 in today's dollar is $8203.77

3 comments:

  1. I bought mine at a Comp-USA going-out-of-business sale (you can place the approximate time of my purchase by the historically significant closing of this chain store.). I paid twelve dollars for it.

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  2. Well.. at least we've seen a value increase. I got mine in 2015 for 30 USD!

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