Panasonic Computer 30 years anniversary page | Hacker News Reader

Panasonic Computer 30 years anniversary page

panasonic.jp

14 pointsbaybal211 comments

I got one of these at a jumble sale in the 1990s: https://vintagecomputer.com/panasonic-executive-partner.html

There's so much insane ambition here-- the best of wacky innovative Peak Japan.

Let's build a clamshell laptop. But instead of a battery, let's include a printer! Instead of the cutdown 8088, use a full 8086! And make it about 50% the size of a normal laptop in every dimension, so you can have normal 5.25" drives! And an ISA slot! And since the plasma screen doesn't render colour well, let's set up a character ROM with bold and italics to provide the same differentiation!

Yes, it looks very quirky but it still retains it's mysterious air. I remember seeing a photo that I didn't understood until I read the caption. The photo was from the 70s Japan and there were several women, factory workers, in an line orderly rubbing their eyes. The caption was something like "workers take a break to rest their eyes" and then I notice that at each end of each assembly line there was a person (woman) soldering very small circuits with the help of microscopes. That was very heroic Japanese, a lot of those early computers had a lot of manual work applied to them and a lot of minutia work was done by very dexterous women.

They've always built the ugliest notebooks in the business but their commitment to features and performance is unmatched, at least since IBM sold the ThinkPad brand. I'm not sure any other company would've been bold enough to put an optical disc drive directly under the touchpad. They still include physical mouse buttons as well as VGA and ethernet ports, which are all becoming rare.

Panasonic Toughbooks were the only laptops that survived the oil rig workers that frequented the shop I used to bench tech at back in the early 00s. They were awesome rugged with touch screens years before others.

Panasonic of 90s looked unstoppable in consumer electronics. Panasonic now looks like a shell

I don't know what all they are up to these days, but they are heavily involved with making Tesla batteries

Panasonic in the 90s was making everything from TVs and laptops and mobiles (Panasonic) to kitchen appliances (National) to advanced sound systems (Technics). They had a unique culture that actually made it fun to work there and made people extremely loyal. Fast forward to a few decades and it has practically turned to shit in all departments, even though their products are actually good.

Source:- Dad was a Pana-manager

Without making a conscious brand based decision, i found myself owning lots of Panasonic electronics in the the 90s. Walkmans, CD Walkmans, headphones, TVs, Car Stereos.

They all seemed to me to beat the Sony equivalents, in execution if not in innovation.

30 years on and they're still using images for basic text content, making it impossible for text translators and screen readers. どうして？

Most of the text was positioned on top of the image/video elements, my translator was able to detect them.

I think this is quite a well implemented site (coming from someone who built marketing pages like this for a while).

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