It's not the end for Toshiba, it's just the end of their presence on the stock market. And that's fine, companies can be 'taken private' again just as they can IPO. Being publicly traded is sometimes a plus and sometimes it works against you. Not every large company is stock exchange listed, nor should they be.
Sad. When I was young, I worked every weekend for 6 months straight during a hot summer washing boats and was able to save up just enough money to buy an entry level Toshiba laptop. I didn't even think I could afford a laptop at the time and was saving up for a desktop machine so it was a pleasant surprise when I saw it in the shop at such good price.<p>It was a great purchase. Lasted me years. I self-taught myself coding on that machine. I owned a few Toshiba laptops since. It was my go-to brand. After they started disappearing from shops, I ended up going with HP, then Dell then Asus. None of them were quite the same standard as Toshiba.
This makes me sad. They funded a lot of GNU toolchain in the late 90s / early 00s, directly and indirectly, and I have a lot of good memories working with the people there.
The best laptop I ever owned was from Toshiba. Fantastic performance for what I paid, quiet and seemingly indestructible based on what it went through. When it came time to upgrade I learned that Toshiba had exited the market entirely and that everyone else had switched to making shit tier garbage designed for Windows 8. At that point I bought a Macbook Pro but I can't say I was ever thrilled by it, or that my feelings have changed with each successive iteration. Go well Toshiba, you'll be missed.
My wife's Toshiba laptop was bought in 2005 and still works. It's a 32-bit machine with just 1–2 GB of memory, but I put a SSD a few years ago and with this setup Linux runs fine. I still use it sometimes, as it's the smallest laptop we have in our house and it's handy to use it while in bed for browsing and checking mail.
Toshiba's crash from grace is the poster boy of everything that is wrong with Japan.<p>Lest we forget, Toshiba <i>invented</i> NAND flash only for them and Japan (namely the patent office) to throw it out the window for the likes of Intel and Sandisk to pick it up and create an entire industry.<p>There is perhaps no better time to say that, nothing of value was lost here.
Related earlier:<p><i>Toshiba to be delisted after 74 years, faces future with new owners</i><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701053">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38701053</a>