Toshiba has finalized its exit from the laptop business by selling its remaining shares of Dynabook, its laptop division, to Sharp. In doing so, Toshiba officially ends a run that spanned three and a half decades.
It also represents a complete exit from the personal computer business, in terms of desktops and laptops. This began two years ago when Toshiba sold 80.1 percent of its PC business to Sharp for $36 million, which it announced in a PDF filing (via PCMag), a deal that also provided brand licensing rights. Toshiba then renamed its remaining PC division Dynavision. That is now gone as well.
"Toshiba Corporation hereby announces that it has transferred the 19.9 percent 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.
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Going all the way back to 1985, Toshiba's very first laptop was the T1100. It debuted with an Intel 80C88 CPU clocked at 4.77MHz, alongside 256KB of RAM, a pair of disk drives, and a monochrome LCD screen with a 640x200 resolution. Out of the gate, it ran MS-DOS 2.11. And was unable to run Crysis (partly because it didn't exist yet).
While Toshiba is no longer making computers, its ties have not been severed completely. Notably, it still makes storage and NAND flash memory products. This includes hard disk drives (HDDs) under its own label, and solid state drives (SSDs) under its Kioxia subsidiary.
It's been an interesting journey for Toshiba, which acquired OCZ's assets for $35 million in 2013. Toshiba dabbled with the OCZ brand for a few years, including the launch of high-speed OCZ RD400 NVMe SSDs in 2016, but these days is more focused on the enterprise market.
