Driven by the punitive 100% import duty imposed by the US government on Japanese microcomputers, Toshiba Corp has rushed up US manufacturing of all its lap-top machines, and now says that it will make them at its new Irvine, California plant for the world market, starting next month with an initial 40 assembly workers. To get the new operation off to a bouncy start, the company will add two new models to the current 8088-based T1100 Plus and the 80286-based T3100, one, the T1000, claimed at 6 lbs 8 oz to be the lightest laptop Personalike yet. The T1000 has 80C88 processor with 512Kb of memory, one 3.5 floppy drive and a Supertwist Liquid Crystal Diode display and will be out in the US in July at $1,200. The machine was previewed in Computergram in April (CI No 659), but there is no word yet of the other machine previewed then – an 80386-based T4100. However the US operation is also planning to do a hard disk T1200 version of the T1000.