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T April 2002 • Vol.6 Issue 4	Add To My Personal Library
Toshiba to trackball

Toshiba
total cost of ownership (TCO)
touch screen
touchpad
tower model
Traceroute
trackball

Toshiba

The Toshiba Tecra 9000 was the industry's first corporate notebook computer to incorporate integrated Wi-Fi (802.11b) and Bluetooth wireless technologies, as well as a SD (Secure Digital) Media slot.

Toshiba

Toshiba is one of the older and larger Japanese producers of both
consumer and industrial products, and DRAM (dynamic RAM)
computer chips. Toshiba is not one single company. Instead, it is a strong affiliation (the Japanese term is keiretsu) of more than 200
businesses. In a keiretsu, the affiliated companies are linked through shared history and tradition plus interlocking directorates, personal contacts, and the affiliated companies owning shares in each other.

Toshiba began in 1875 with the founding of Tanaka Seizo-sho (which translates from Japanese as Tanaka Engineering Works) by Hisashige Tanaka (1799-1881), the Thomas Edison of Japan. This company was the first Japanese manufacturer of telegraphic equipment. After Mitsui Bank took over the company, the company was renamed Seisaku-sho (Shibaura Manufacturing Company, Ltd.). Seisaku-sho soon became the largest Japanese manufacturer of heavy electrical apparatus and was incorporated in 1904.

In 1939, the Seisaku-sho and Tokyo Denki (Japan's first maker of electric incandescent lamps) companies merged to form an integrated electric equipment manufacturing company named Tokyo Shibaura Denki. The company was soon known by the shorter name of "Toshiba," but Toshiba did not become its official name until 1978. Prior to World War II, the company's innovations included developments with fluorescent lamps and radar. During World War II, Toshiba was naturally cut off from the world market and international suppliers. After the end of World War II, the company once again had access to global technology and raw materials, as well as the global marketplace. In this more favorable business environment, Toshiba flourished. Toshiba produced the first Japanese broadcasting equipment in 1952 and started producing computers in 1954.

One problem that continued to plague Toshiba during this time was an old fashioned, feudal system of management that isolated management from the workers. In the early 1960s, the Japanese economy was hit with a recession that greatly exacerbated the problems at Toshiba, causing after-tax profits to drop to almost one-third of their prior level, from $36 million down to $13 million.

An outsider, Toshiwo Doko, was brought in to take charge of the company. This was a major shift for a Japanese company. Doko arranged for General Electric to buy Toshiba bonds. This let Toshibaexpand and modernize. Doko also started Toshiba on a plan to export its products worldwide. Toshiba did expand and grow, but compared to other Japanese companies such as Sony, its performance was less impressive.

In 1984, Toshiba formed an Information and Communications Systems Laboratory to develop office automation products. Also in 1984, Toshiba was responsible for the first direct broadcast satellite. In 1985, Toshiba developed the first 1MB DRAM chip. In just two years, Toshiba was producing almost half of the worldwide volume of these chips. Semiconductors became an important part of Toshiba's business. In 1986, Toshiba and Motorola entered a joint agreement where Toshiba produced chips for Motorola in Japan. That same year Toshiba also entered into a joint agreement with AT&T to help develop and distribute PBX (private branch exchange) telephone systems in Japan.

Also in 1986, Toshiba entered into an agreement with IBM to market its computers in Japan. This agreement led to the introduction of the first notebook PC in Japan, the TJ3100. By 1991, Toshiba had more than 20% of the notebook market. Toshiba was well on its way in what is now its best-known product line.

In 1987, a major scandal overshadowed all of Toshiba's products and successes. The scandal involved Toshiba Machine, a subsidiary in which Toshiba was half owner. Toshiba Machine sold submarine sound deadening stealth equipment to the Soviet Union that made it harder for U.S. and NATO ships and planes to detect Soviet submarines.

Because of the scandal, two executives at Toshiba Machine were arrested and several others resigned. The president of Toshiba, then Sugichiro Watari, publicly apologized. The U.S. Senate voted to ban the import of Toshiba products for three years, and Watari and the chairman of Toshiba resigned.

Joichi Aoi replaced Watari as president. Aoi led Toshiba in a major global expansion effort. Toshiba began selling television integrated circuit technology to a Chinese company. Toshiba entered into a ¥12 billion (approximately $93 million) contract to build a color television plant in Russia. This international expansion more than offset the loss of American business.

Profits declined significantly in the first half of the 1990s due to a global recession and the strength of the yen relative to other currencies. To offset this, Toshiba worked on reducing product development time and lowering production costs.

Currently, Toshiba is a global organization. It has more than 80 Toshiba businesses around the world. These have more than 30 production facilities and about 190,000 employees. Toshiba is best known for its notebook computers. Its sales of notebook computers worldwide are always at or near the top. However, Toshiba makes a wide range of electronic products. These products fall into the following divisions:

• Information & Communications and Industrial Systems. This division manufactures desktop and notebook computers and medical information systems. In 2000, it accounted for ¥1.8 trillion (about $16 billion) in revenues.

•Digital Media. This division manufactures network related equipment, cellular phones, data storage equipment, video products, flat screen televisions, and digital cameras. In 2000, it accounted for ¥1.6 trillion (about $13.8 billion) in revenues.

•Power Systems. This division manufactures equipment for nuclear power plants, thermal generation plants, and industrial electrical apparatus and machinery. In 2000, it accounted for ¥582.7 billion (about $5.1 billion) in revenues.

•Electronic Devices and Components. This division manufactures semiconductors, LCDs (liquid-crystal displays), all nonflat screen televisions, monitor picture tubes, and rechargeable batteries. In 2000, it accounted for ¥1.6 trillion (about $13.6 billion) in revenues.

•Home Appliances. This division manufactures refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and similar appliances. In 2000, it accounted for ¥39.9 billion (about $349 million) in revenues.

•Other. This division handles financial services, real estate, leasing, and logistics. In 2000, it accounted for ¥695.7 billion (about $6.1 billion) in revenues.

For its fiscal 2000 year ending March 31, 2001, worldwide sales were ¥5.95 trillion (more than $47 billion).

Sales within Japan represent 63% of sales, within North America 13.9%, within Asia 12.3%, within Europe 8.8%. Other sales make up the remaining 2%. In 2000, the net income on sales was ¥96.2 billion (about $840 million). Total assets were ¥5.7 trillion (about $50 billion).

Terms associated with Toshiba:

TAI (Toshiba America Inc.): TAI is a holding company for Toshiba that was established in 1965. It was incorporated in its current form in March 1989. TAI had annual sales of $7.5 billion in fiscal 1999. TAI has six separate operating companies:

TABS (Toshiba America Business Solutions). TABS was established in 1999. It handles planning, marketing, sales, service, and distribution of network printers, copiers, and related equipment. TABS currently has about 1,600 employees.

TACP (Toshiba America Consumer Products). TACP was established in 1989. It manufactures and markets home entertainment consumer electronic products. TACP currently has about 1,200 employees.

TAEC (Toshiba America Electronic Components). TAEC was established in 1965. It markets Toshiba Corporation electronic components in North America. TAEC currently has about 700 employees.

TAIS (Toshiba America Information Systems). TAIS was established in 1988 and is what most of think of when we think of Toshiba. TAIS manufactures and markets notebook and desktop computers, and related products. TAIS currently has about 1,900 employees. TAIS released its first notebook computer in 1985. It released its first 80486 notebook computer in 1991 and its first Pentium notebook computer in 1994.

TAMS (Toshiba America Medical Systems). TAMS was established in 1989. It markets, sells, distributes, and services medical diagnostic imaging systems. TAMS currently has about 875 employees.

TIC (Toshiba International Corp.). TIC was established in 1970. It designs and manufactures motors, motor controls, and power electronic products. TIC currently has about 960 employees.

In addition to these six operating companies, TAR (Toshiba America Research) is the research arm of Toshiba America. TAR was established in 1998. Its mission is to create the technologies necessary to integrate wireless and Internet communications.

total cost of ownership (TCO)

When you purchase a new car, you know it is going to cost you more than just its sticker price. For as long as you own that car, you must buy gas, pay for maintenance and insurance, and perhaps pay for a garage to house the car. To get really detailed costs, you must include speeding and parking tickets, tolls, parking charges, and other similar items. Similarly, the cost of a new computer far exceeds the cost of the computer itself. Although individual users rarely consider these additional costs, they are of critical concern to business. In fact, these additional costs associated with the computer often far exceed the purchase price of the computer itself.

The total of all of the costs associated with any purchase of capital equipment, no matter if it is a car or a computer, is called the TCO. One study put the TCO of a new business computer at more than $10,000 per year. Financial analysts break the TCO of a business computer down into four broad components:

•The purchase price of the computer and all of its supporting equipment, such as a printer or a scanner. These are capital costs, and they are usually expressed as an annual value that spreads them out over the life of the equipment. Accountants call these annualized costs depreciation.

•The administrative cost of buying the equipment, tracking and administering it over its life, and disposing of it at the end of its life.

•The support that must be provided by the organization over the life of the computer. This goes beyond just solving problems to include time spent connecting it to the network, repairing virus damage, and any other services provided by the IT (information technology) department. These costs would also include the cost of maintaining the network infrastructure to which the computer is attached.

•The end user costs. This includes training the end user; the time the user spends performing backups, disk optimization, and other routine maintenance; as well as the downtime the user experiences when the computer is not working. Because labor costs are so high, this category of costs tends to be the largest.

Microsoft estimates that purchase price represents 21% of TCO, administration represents 12%, technical support represents 21%, and end user costs represent the remaining 46%.

TCO, and especially its high end user labor cost, is the driving force behind thin clients and network computers. These computers move much of the software and some of the hardware to a central location where they can be managed and upgraded by professionals. That, in turn, lowers the TCO for the company.

Looking at just the TCO for a computer can be very misleading. Presumably, the business purchased the computer because it was expected that the computer would directly or indirectly generate revenue for the company. Although, everything else being equal, businesses prefer a lower TCO, as long as the revenue associated with a computer exceeds its TCO, the business is better off owning the computer. When the benefits of owning the computer are included in the calculations, TCO is called TVO (total value of ownership).

touchpad
Like many other notebook computers, Dell Latitude notebooks come with a touchpad rather than a mouse.

Photo courtesy of Dell Computer Corp.

touchpad

Similar to a mouse, a touchpad is a device for moving a pointer around a computer display. Unlike a mouse, the touchpad does not need to be physically moved, making it ideal for use in a notebook computer. Additionally, a touchpad is a sealed unit so it is unaffected by crumbs or dust, a real asset for a portable device that might be used in almost any environment.

George E. Gerpheide invented the touchpad in 1988. Apple Computer licensed his design and first used it in its PowerBook notebook computers in 1994. Since then, the touchpad has become the most common cursor control device for notebook computers. Alternative notebook cursor control devices include the trackball and the TrackPoint pointing stick IBM uses in its ThinkPad computers in conjunction with a touchpad.

A touchpad contains several different layers of material. The top layer is a protective coating designed to let your finger glide over it while protecting the rest of the unit from wear and contamination. Below the top layer are two layers of electrodes in a grid arrangement. The upper layer uses vertical electrode strips while the lower layer uses horizontal strips. A very thin layer of insulation separates each layer, and the layers are connected to an integrated circuit. The electrodes are charged with alternating current, and the integrated circuit constantly measures the capacitance of the horizontal electrodes to each of the vertical electrodes. When the user touches the pad, the capacitance between the two layers of electrodes changes since the dielectric properties of a finger are very different from the air it displaces.

By measuring this change in capacitance, the integrated circuit knows exactly where the pad was touched. As a finger moves over the touchpad, the changes in location are noted by the integrated circuit and translated into cursor movements. Most touchpads let you tap the pad instead of clicking a button. The integrated circuit registers this, as well. Many touchpads also include buttons that work like mouse buttons.

A few desktop keyboards include a touchpad; however, they have not proven popular with users. Some proponents of touchpads feel they are less likely than a mouse to cause repetitive motion injuries; not all experts agree with this assessment.

touch screen

A touch screen is a special type of computer display that lets the user interact with the computer by touching the screen rather than typing on a keyboard or moving a mouse. The touch technology must be built into the monitor or LCD (liquid-crystal display).

There are three approaches to making a display touch-sensitive: resistive, surface wave, and capacitive. With a resistive touch screen, the screen is coated with a very thin metallic layer that has both conductive and resistive material. Touching the screen causes a change in the electrical current that lets the controller identify the touched area. Resistive touch screens are cheaper and are unaffected by dust or moisture. However, the screen is not as clear as other approaches, and sharp objects can damage the screen.

With a surface wave touch screen, ultrasonic sound waves are passed over the touch screen. Touching the screen causes a portion of the wave to be absorbed and that lets the controller identify the touched area. In some models, infrared light is used instead of ultrasonic waves. This is the most advanced, and expensive, approach.

With a capacitive touch screen, the screen is coated with a material that stores an electrical charge. Touching the screen disrupts that charge at the point of contact and lets the controller identify the touched area. Although the other two approaches work with almost any pointing device, a capacitive touch screen only works with fingers or a special stylus that is connected to the computer and has an electrical charge. Capacitive touch screens are least affected by outside elements and have the highest clarity.

Once the display identifies the point of contact, this information is transmitted to the OS (operating system) just as mouse movements and transmitted to the OS. A special driver is required to tell the OS how to respond to touches to the display.

Touch screens have several significant drawbacks that make them unsatisfactory for most applications. A finger is a relatively large pointing device, making it difficult to make small and accurate adjustments to the position of the cursor. In addition, constantly touching the screen is tiring on the arms and the long movement from the keyboard to the screen slows down typing. Constantly touching the screen also results in an always-dirty screen. This is, however, not the case if a stylus is used rather than a finger.

A major advantage of a touch screen is it is resistant to harsh environments where a keyboard or mouse might fail. When combined with specially written software that uses large on-screen buttons, this advantage makes touch screens a practical way to control a computer in a difficult environment, such as a factory floor. It is also easier to secure a touch screen than a keyboard or mouse, making the touch screen the input method of choice for public information kiosks. Touch screens can also be made very small. This makes them well suited as inputs for PDAs (personal digital assistants) where space does not allow for a keyboard or mouse.

tower model
This Dell tower computer shows how components can be arranged vertically so the computer stands comfortably on the floor and still has all its drives orientated properly.

tower model

The typical desktop computer has a small case that sits underneath the monitor. Although most users find this convenient, it does have several drawbacks. First, it takes up more desk space than would be required for just the monitor, which is called its footprint. Second, it raises the monitor 3 to 4 inches, and on a tall desk, that can force you to tilt your head to read the monitor. Third, it has limited room for expansion.

A solution for all three problems is the tower model, also called the tower configuration. This model has a rectangular case designed to fit out of the way on the floor. This lowers the monitor by placing it directly on the desk and reduces the space on the desk that would otherwise be dedicated to the computer. Because a tower case gains its space vertically rather than horizontally, a small footprint can support a lot of space for equipment and future expansion.

Traditional towers are between 21 and 24 inches tall and have room for a combination of about five floppy diskette, CD, Zip, and tape drives that need to be accessible from the outside and two to four internal hard drives. They also tend to have more slots than a typical desktop computer. Many computer manufacturers also offer midsize towers that are about 16 inches tall and minitowers that are about 14 inches tall.

A desktop computer can be converted into a tower by turning it on its side and placing it on the floor. Because desktop cases tend to be narrower and thus easier to tip over, special stands are available to firmly hold the case.

Traceroute
Windows includes a DOS Traceroute program called Tracert.exe that must be run from the command line.

Traceroute

Traceroute is a utility that determines the route packets are taking from the host computer to any computer on the Internet. This route will consist of hops (or passes) between various router computers. In addition to tracing the route, Traceroute also displays the time taken between each hop.

The main use of Traceroute is to troubleshoot slow response times by pinpointing the source of the bottleneck. Another utility, called PING (Packet Internet Groper), is usually used prior to Traceroute. PING checks to make sure that the target computer is actually responding.

Traceroute works by using the TTL (time to live) value in the ICMP (Internet Control Message Protocol). By setting the TTL to one, the first router will discard the packet and notify the user. This tells Traceroute the first router. Increasing the TTL to two will identify the second router, and so on. In this fashion, the entire route can be mapped. By timing the period between sending and receiving these packets, network response time along the route is computed.

Traceroute determines when the packet reaches its destination by including an invalid port number in the packet. When the destination receives the packet, it sends back a Port Unreachable message. This tells Traceroute that the destination was reached because none of the routers would examine the packet that closely. This also lets Traceroute measure the time required for the final hop.

trackball
A trackball, such as this one from Kensington, resembles a flipped-over mouse. The trackball works much like a stationary mouse.

trackball

A trackball is essentially a mouse turned upside down. Its purpose is the same as a mouse—to position the cursor on the screen. Trackballs can position the pointer more precisely than mice, making them popular with CAD (computer-aided design) operators.

Unlike a mouse, a trackball is stationary. The trackball has a large ball on top. To move the pointer, the user rotates the ball with a finger or the palm of his hand. This movement of the ball by the user mimics how a mouse ball rotates as the users moves the mouse. Because the trackball housing is stationary, a trackball can be used on surfaces that would not work with a mouse. Additionally, there are usually one or more buttons on a trackball, just as there are on a mouse.

Because a trackball does not have to be moved, they are popular with users who have very small desks. Some desktop keyboards have a trackball built in so the user never needs to move his hands from the keyboard. A few notebook computers have a trackball built into the keyboard rather than a touchpad.

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