Toshiba has recently transferred all its remaining shares in Dynabook Inc to Sharp. This transaction ultimately marked the company’s exit from the laptop market.
Toshiba’s departure from the space did not take place overnight though. The transaction that the company announced earlier this month was a continuation of the deal that happened back in June 2018 whereby 80.1% of the company’s PC business arm, Toshiba Client Solutions’ (TCS) shares were acquired by Sharp.
As a result of this deal, TCS name was changed to Dynabook which is quite surprising given that it is a brand name that Toshiba has used since 1989. Sharp also continued to use Toshiba laptop’s series name such as Portege, Tecra, and Satellite even after it became Dynabook’s majority shareholder.
Taking a look back at its history, Toshiba first foray into the laptop business was back in 1985 through the release of the T1100. Equipped with a monochrome LCD that has a resolution of 640 x 200 as well as a built-in 3.5-inch floppy disk drive, the laptop was powered by an Intel 80C88 processor alongside 256kb of RAM that is puny by today’s standard and also has MS-DOS as its operating system.
According to its brochure [pdf], the T1100 also has a battery life of up to 8 hours which is something that many modern laptops have trouble to achieve. It is quite a hefty device though at 4.1kg (“very light” in 1985) which these days is something that usually only applies to high-end gaming laptops with large screen.
While we don’t know what the future beholds for Dynabook now that it is under full control of Sharp but for now, we shall bid a heartfelt farewell to Toshiba-branded laptops.
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