(www.theregister.com)
Toshiba has made laptops since 1985 and claims to have been the first to make a mass-market computer in the now-familiar clamshell form factor. By the 1990s the company was producing solid workhorses in the Satellite range and started to make meaningful stretches of mobile work possible with the small, thin and light Portégé range.
Those products saw Toshiba lead the world for laptop market share through the late 1990s and retain that position for much of the 2000s. Even as the PC market consolidated in that decade, Toshiba was often ranked among the top five of all PC vendors despite only ever dabbling in desktops.
As the 2000s rolled along Toshiba devices became bland in comparison to the always-impressive ThinkPad and the MacBook Air, while Dell and HP also improved. Toshiba also never really tried to capture consumers’ imaginations, which didn't help growth.
Toshiba made some of the most durable laptops ever made and this news saddens me. I still have two R705s still running Windows 7 and Linux respectively in my closet and it Just Worked. A true end of an era.
Toshiba, which started making laptops in 1985, has formally exited the laptop business, after Sharp acquired Toshiba's final shares in Dynabook