In a nutshell: Retrofuturism has made an unlikely comeback in office tech with Toshiba’s latest release, the Jimucon SJ-9500. This chunky all-in-one desktop boldly blends vintage components like a dot matrix printer with modern hardware into one eye-catching package.
This office “workhorse” is the successor to Toshiba’s SJ-9100 model, continuing a line of quirky business machines the company has been churning out since way back in 1982 under the “Jimucon” name. But the new SJ-9500 might just be the most striking model yet.
Running Windows 10 IoT Enterprise, it rocks an old-school 24-pin dot matrix printer capable of printing at up to 240 characters per second – complete with those impact printing sound effects that will remind you of office environments of decades past. The printer can also handle wide-format paper around 12 inches across.
Of course, since this is an all-in-one unit, you also get a 15-inch color touchscreen panel with a 1024 x 768 resolution mounted right on the printer. Under the hood, there’s a humble 8GB of RAM alongside dual 240GB solid-state drives. One SSD is for actively running apps while the other stores data. There’s even a handy slot to stash the keyboard into the main unit when not in use. Last but not least, a three-minute battery backup kicks in during power outages to help you quickly wrap up work.
The whole thing can be customized for different industries too. PC Watch points out its usefulness for printing all sorts of forms, managing inventory and orders, crunching finances and construction costs, overseeing manifests, and even handling industrial waste disposal duties if needed.
Connectivity options are impressively extensive, with six USB ports, serial ports, DisplayPort, and Gigabit Ethernet for linking up peripherals like barcode scanners and additional monitors.
You can tell by now that this machine shapes up as a potential jack-of-all-trades for getting work done. All that technology does make the machine rather hefty at 23kg (50 pounds), though it’s still fairly compact for all it offers at 538 × 658 × 418 mm.
Japan is something of a goldmine for retro technology – the country eliminated floppy disks from government use only this year. Recently, a Japanese company launched a 56K modem for anyone still relying on ancient copper phone lines to surf the web. There is also this quirky M.2 card that plays retro sounds when you boot up your PC. Sadly, since such gadgets are usually exclusive to the country, getting them shipped stateside can be a pain.