The First Toshiba Laptop – Cutting Edge Technology

In April of 1985, the Toshiba Corporation introduced the T 1100 to the world. It was the first first IBM compatible laptop ever. It is in no small way thanks to this revolutionary machine that just about every household in the United States has a laptop computer today. Of course, Toshiba was not the first corporation to think of the idea, but they were the first ones to offer a product that included some of the standard features that are still included in laptop computers to this day. The T 1100 ran off of rechargeable batteries, and had a 3.5 "floppy disk drive.

At the time, a computer that was not compatible with an IBM PC was almost sure to fail in the US market. Toshiba had experienced this first hand when they had tried to enter into the desktop computer market just a few years ago but failed because machine was not IBM-compatible. Development of the T 1100 began a year earlier in 1984 and the engineers had a working prototype just four short months later. The laptop first went on sale in Europe for about $ 2090 US.

Although it sees almost prehistoric by today's standards, the T 1100 was a cutting edge machine in the mid-80s. It featured an 80C88 processor from Intel and had a standard 256k bytes of memory. Its LCD screen had a pixel density of 640 x 200 and used an IBM-compatible operating system that was developed by Toshiba using BIOS from Microsoft. By the end of that year, Toshiba had sold just short of 10,000 T 1100s. Not everyone at the company believed that such a device would be a success among consumers, but the revolutionary minds at Toshiba saw the project through to fruition.

Since that first device, Toshiba has become an industry leader in mobile computing. The company has spent over 135 years innovating and bringing to market products that changed the lives of consumers forever. They have influenced the design of everything from washing machines to televisions and produce some of the most advanced laptop computers available on the market today. The laptops, notebooks, and netbook computers produced by Toshiba today are a far cry from that first laptop over 25 years ago, but they carry with them a rich heritage of cutting-edge technology and usability that is almost unmatched in the industry.