News
Fujitsu celebrates 75 years of innovation
June 2010 by Emmanuelle Lamandé
This month Fujitsu is celebrating its 75 year anniversary. Fujitsu has been a fundamental part of some of the IT industry’s breakthroughs and innovations – from the early days of telephone switching in the 1930s; the mainframe and parallel computing generation of the 1970s, to more recent inventions such as palm vein authentication and the world’s first 3D PC.
Today Fujitsu is a £2 billion revenue company in the UK and Ireland; managing over 1 million desktops across government departments and private organisations; was the first company in Europe to have a Tier III certified data centre, and recently won the UK’s largest desktop and thin client outsource deal with the Department for Work and Pensions.
History of Fujitsu
Fujitsu’s roots began in rebuilding the telecommunications infrastructure in Japan after the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 had destroyed much of the public infrastructure of Tokyo and Yokohama. In 1935 Fuji Tsushinki Manufacturing Corporation, the company which later became Fujitsu Limited, was founded as an offshoot of the communications division of Fuji Electric Co, Ltd.
In 1990 Fujitsu took an 80% stake in the British International Computers Limited (ICL). In 1998 ICL became a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu and was known as Fujitsu ICL. The company dropped the ICL name in 2002 and is now known as just Fujitsu.
In 2008 Fujitsu acquired Siemens’ 50% stake in the PC, server and storage joint venture Fujitsu Siemens Computer and in 2009 took full control and renamed it Fujitsu Technology Solutions.
Key Fujitsu innovations have included:
1935 – The Step-by-Step telephone switching machine
1945 – The Fuji Model-3 telephone
1954 – The Facom-100 mainframe computer
1974 – The ICL 2900 series mainframe (ICL)
1979 – The ICL Distributed Array Processor, the world’s first parallel computer (ICL)
1980 – The Oays 100 first Japanese language word processor
1989 – Colour plasma displays
2003 – Palm Vein authentication
2010 – the world’s first 3D PC
