Hi. I was wondering what version of Panasonic Toughbook is oldest. From information what I found on internet it was model CF-41 from 1994 (which cost at that time above 8500$!!!), but maybe is any older, you know where to find some information about old Panasonic Toughbook ? Thanks in advance.

Panasonic's 10th anniversary press release (link to an archived version at the Internet Archive (archive.org)) document, published on 29 August 2006 by Panasonic, mentions that the company "made the decision in 1994 to concentrate on the robust mobile computer market segment", but it also mentions that "ruggedized notebooks of Panasonic’s “Toughbook” series
turn 10 this year[=2006]".

I've done some digging and searched my notes regarding Toughbooks (I have way too many relatively messy .txt files all over the place...) and apparently the CF-40 was sold as "Panasonic Pronote SD CF-40" in Japan, where it was originally released in February 1995, but it was only "consumed-ruggedized" as opposed to being fully ruggedized. Sadly I haven't written down where I got all this info from. The Toughbook wikispace, which has plenty of information about (older) Toughbooks, doesn't even mention the CF-40!

Given the press release by Panasonic and various other sources (such as a machine translation of Japanese Wikipedia's "TOUGHBOOK" article, which identifies the CF-25 as the first Toughbook in the "history" section), I think we all can agree that the CF-25 is the first real Toughbook.
While consumer and business ruggedized laptops are nice, I personally think that they fall somewhere inbetween your run-of-the-mill laptops sold in hypermarkets and that usually last a couple years (if even that many) and real, fully rugged Toughbooks (that won't break down, no matter what you do).

Generally speaking, there's quite a lot of information available about the fully rugged Toughbooks online. The two most popular Toughbook-oriented English-language communities I can think of are NotebookReview.com's forum and Rob's Toughbook Talk. NBR's forum might be better known, but it's not as structured as Rob's, and any and all discussion about BIOS password bypassing and similar, possibly controversial things is strictly prohibited. Rob's forum has separate sections for many Toughbook models as opposed to having one giant section, but in order to be able to post, you need to e-mail Rob so that he can manually confirm your account; then again, discussion about BIOS passwords and such is OK there.

Since fully rugged Toughbooks are probably the most popular Toughbooks, the other Toughbooks aren't as well-documented as they are. For example, I bought a semi-rugged CF-72 (Mark 1) some time ago. Finding information about it online was quite a challenge — I ended up browsing through NotebookReview's Panasonic forum's entire history, reading the topics on the Tougbook wikispaces site and finally I had compiled a .txt file that contains a lot of essential information about this particular Toughbook that I was able to find. So while there might be some useful information about older/not fully rugged models out there, it isn't necessarily easy to come across by!