Toshiba has not been able to keep up with the competition for years now, and the company is now calling it quits on its laptop business by selling its minority stake to Sharp.
Back in 2018, the Japanese tech giant sold almost 80% of its laptop business to Sharp, which now sells machines under the brand name Dynabook. The company has announced (via Gizmodo) in a blog post that the remaining 19.9% minority stake is also going under Sharp’s roof. This came after Sharp exercised a call option to buy the remaining shares from Toshiba.
As a result, Dynabook Inc. is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sharp Corporation. The business deal marks the end of Toshiba’s three-decade-old computer business accredited for the world’s first mass-market laptop – Toshiba T1100, released in 1985. It was the first IBM compatible laptop on the market and set the stage for all the different machines we have right now.
Toshiba T1100 packed an Intel 80C88 CPU with 256 KB of RAM and came with support for 3.5″ and 5.2″ floppy drives for storage. The 35-year-old portable computer had a 640 x 200 display and ran MS-DOS. Back then, it was priced at $1,899, which would be close to the new Apple Mac Pro today.
This is one of the examples that Toshiba was once an industry leader in the laptop market, which is now populated by the likes of Apple, HP, Dell, Lenovo, etc.
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