Tokyo - Toshiba is ending its 35-year run in the laptop business.
The Japanese company sold 80.1 percent of its PC business to Sharp for $36 million two years ago. In January 2019, Sharp renamed the division Dynabook. In June, Sharp exercised its right to buy the remaining 19.1 percent of the outstanding shares
Just a week ago, the company made a statement that the deal was completed.
“Toshiba Corporation hereby announces that it has transferred the 19.9% of the outstanding shares in Dynabook Inc. that it held to Sharp Corporation. As a result of this transfer, Dynabook has become a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp,” Toshiba said in a statement.
The company made its first laptop debut in 1985 with the T1100, and it was later on described as the world’s first mass-market laptop computer. It did not have a hard drive, and it ran entirely from floppy disks. It was followed by the T1000 and T 1200 in 1987 it had limited floppy-based DOS machines, with the operating system stored in ROM.
The Toshiba models were small and light enough to be carried in a backpack and could be run from lead-acid batteries. They also introduced the now-standard ‘resume’ feature to DOS-based machines and the computer could be paused between sessions without having to be restarted each time.
According to Reuters, Toshiba was among the top ten PC manufacturers around the ’90s and early 2000. At the time it decided to sell its stake to Sharp, Toshiba’s share of the PC market had decreased from its 2011 peak of 17.7 million PCs sold to about 1.4 million in 2017.
IOL TECH