Principals tell how Toshiba’s T1100 became first IBM-compatible and incited a revolution.
Twenty years ago this month, Toshiba offered for sale the T1100, the world’s first IBM-compatible laptop computer. The machine sparked a laptop industry that will sell 195 million units this year.
But the T1100 almost didn’t happen.
Executives in Tokyo were skeptical of Toshiba’s ability to successfully launch the machine, and a lack of software led one of the project’s leaders to repeatedly visit a major software vendor until they agreed to release necessary applications.
Portable computing wasn’t new in 1985. A series of machines from companies such as Osborne, Radio Shack and Epson had been on the market, but the T1100 was the first that included a basic feature set that would become the standard for portable computers for the next 20 years: It ran off internal rechargeable batteries, had an LCD screen, a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive and, perhaps most importantly, was compatible with the IBM PC.
Toshiba already knew the importance of such compatibility. Its entry into the U.S. desktop PC market a few years earlier ended in failure because its machine lacked IBM compatibility.
In the wake of this failure, three Toshiba employees went to Los Angeles in 1983 for two months to plan the company’s re-entry into the U.S. computer market. The trio worked with McKinsey & Company on the project, called “Brighter Blue,” and concluded that a new desktop PC was not the way to go.
“Transportable computers were becoming popular but they were very, very, very big,” says Atsutoshi Nishida, who led the project and is now an executive vice president at Toshiba (he will become president in June). “Our plan was for a clamshell-type transportable PC with an LCD and IBM compatibility.”
The team returned to Tokyo but was met with skepticism. Senior management didn’t believe that the market would accept such a computer under the Toshiba brand. Nishida offered the machine to other companies for them to sell, on an OEM basis, and they all declined.
The rejections didn’t dent Nishida’s confidence, and he persisted in pushing the idea. He finally got approval, but only after promising he could sell 10,000 in a year.
“Back then it was a very large quantity,” he says.
Despite approval, management wouldn’t provide any cash for development. Toshiba’s PC division couldn’t afford to finance the project, so Nishida committed funds from his international sales and marketing budget, recalls Nobuyuki Tanaka, one of the original engineers and today a senior vice president at Toshiba.
Prior to commercialization, the project faced another hurdle. Toshiba’s desktop PC experience revealed that no one would buy a PC without software. While the T1100 was to be IBM-compatible, it was based on 3.5-inch floppy disks. At that time the industry was standardized around 5.25-inch disks, and there was no software available on the smaller versions.
“With no software it could run, our product would be just a box,” Nishida says.
Nishida’s first call was to Lotus Development (now a unit of IBM). A request to the European sales manager for a version of Lotus 1-2-3 on the new floppy disk was refused. A second visit resulted in refusal again, as did a third visit. Undeterred, Nishida visited the offices for a fourth time.
“By my fourth visit he was fed up with my persistence in the face of refusal,” Nishida says. “He told me he would talk to an engineer as a personal favor, not anything official. . . . The man migrated Lotus 1-2-3 to 3.5-inch floppy disks. It worked perfectly.”
His next call was on Ashton-Tate, a Lotus competitor and maker of the dBase II software. This time agreement came a lot faster and was helped when Nishida mentioned Lotus 1-2-3 was being migrated. Lotus later agreed to make a version of Symphony, although it required two floppies and so had to wait until Toshiba released a subsequent laptop with dual drives.
Software compatibility made up a large part of the development work, says Haruhiko Banno, the engineer who accompanied Nishida to Los Angeles in 1983 and today serves as president and CEO of Toshiba Digital Media Engineering.
It was still an age when IBM-compatibility didn’t always carry an assurance that all software would work.
The T1100 was launched in Europe at the Hanover Messe trade fair in April 1985.
It was based on an Intel 80C88 processor, had 256K bytes of memory as standard, which could be doubled, a 640-by-200 pixel reflective LCD that could display 25 lines of 80 characters and a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive that supported both the 640K- and 720K-byte floppy standards. It measured 31.1-by-6.6-by-30.5 centimeters and weighed nine pounds. The computer was based on an IBM-compatible operating system developed by Toshiba.
It cost 6,480 German marks, which was $2,090 using the exchange rate of the time.
Nishida spent the summer visiting major European companies to promote the machine. Early sales gave Nishida the ammunition he needed to drive further deals because, just like with the software companies, he could use T1100 purchases by competitors to tip the scales in his favor.
“A year later, I had sold almost 10,000 units,” he says. “In fact, I was 230 units short but I sold those soon after. I kept my promise.”
In late 1985, the computer made its first appearance in the U.S. at the Comdex show and went on sale soon after in early 1986. It was beefed up with a faster processor, more memory and a better screen in 1986 to better compete with IBM, which had launched its PC Convertible.
Williams is a correspondent with the IDG News Service.
