} Sord Computer Corporation is a Japanese

electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...

company, founded in 1970 by the

entrepreneur Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values t ...

Takayoshi Shiina. From 1985 until 2018, it was a subsidiary of

Toshiba , commonly known as Toshiba and stylized as TOSHIBA, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include power, industrial and social infrastructure systems, ...

and became known variously as Toshiba Personal Computer System Corporation and Toshiba Platform Solution Corporation. In 2018, Toshiba sold off the business and its name reverted to Sord Computer Corporation. It now focuses on embedded systems among other interests.

History

Early years

SORD was founded by Takayoshi Shiina in 1970 when he was 26 years old. Initially, the company wrote software for DEC PDP minicomputers, before it branched out into hardware production. The name SORD is a contraction of SOftware/haRDware, reflecting the dual focus of the company. Sord presented the SMP80/08 in 1973, one of the first microcomputers, using the

Intel 8008 The Intel 8008 ("''eight-thousand-eight''" or "''eighty-oh-eight''") is an early byte-oriented microprocessor designed by Computer Terminal Corporation (CTC), implemented and manufactured by Intel, and introduced in April 1972. It is an 8-bit CP ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circ ...

. However, it did not have a commercial release. After the first general-purpose microprocessor, the

Intel 8080 The Intel 8080 (''"eighty-eighty"'') is the second 8-bit microprocessor designed and manufactured by Intel. It first appeared in April 1974 and is an extended and enhanced variant of the earlier 8008 design, although without binary compatibil ...

, was announced in April 1974, Sord announced the SMP80/x series in May 1974. In 1977, SORD released the M200 Smart Home Computer, one of the first home computers. It was a desktop computer that combined a

Zilog Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...

CPU, keyboard, CRT display,

floppy disk drive A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, or a diskette) is an obsolescent type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined w ...

and MF-DOS

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also i ...

into an integrated unit. This was followed by the M100 and various other versions of the M100/M200 series, plus the multi-user M223 and M243 computers. The SORD M23 followed in 1981 and become one of the most popular SORD computers. It was one of the first to see significant use outside Japan. In 1982, Sord released the M5, a home computer that primarily competed in the Japanese market. The M68, a dual 8/16 bit computer using both

68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Secto ...

and

Z80 The Z80 is an 8-bit microprocessor introduced by Zilog as the startup company's first product. The Z80 was conceived by Federico Faggin in late 1974 and developed by him and his 11 employees starting in early 1975. The first working samples were ...

CPUs, was released in Japan in 1983. The PIPS - Personal (or Pan) Information Processing System was released in 1980. This package was a combined spreadsheet and database business package. This was followed by PIPS-II in 1981, PIPS-III in 1982 and a complete rewrite (by a team led by Peter Hyde) as 4G-PIPS in 1986.

Under Toshiba ownership

Shiina was approached by a larger Japanese corporation in 1983 and advised to sell. He didn't - and in 1984, on the back of turnover of 35 billion yen and profit of 2 billion yen SORD found itself struggling with suppliers and the banks. SORD was sold to Toshiba in 1985. Under Toshiba, SORD went on to produce additional hardware such as the M68MX (with no Z80A) and M343SX-II multi-user computer and new versions of PIPS, a series of high performance IBM compatible machines and systems based on Alpha. Latterly, SORD (known at that point as Toshiba-TOPS) changed focus to primarily dealing with embedded systems.

Sell-off and restoration of 'Sord' name

In 2018, Toshiba sold Toshiba Platform Solution Corporation to Aspirant Group. Following this, the company name was changed back to Sord Computer Corporation. The company continues the focus on embedded systems begun under Toshiba.

Selected models

* Sord SMP80/08, 1972 * Sord SMP80/x series, 1974 * Sord M200 Smart Home Computer, 1977 * Sord M223 series, 1980 * Sord M68, 1982 * Sord M5, 1982 * Sord M23P (1983),

luggable A portable computer is a computer designed to be easily moved from one place to another and included a display and keyboard together, with a single plug, much like later desktop computers called '' all-in-ones'' (AIO), that integrate the s ...

* Sord M685 Micro-mainframe, 1984 * Sord DF44H Floppy Disk Unit, 1984 * Sord M343SX-2 Multi-user computer, 1984 * Sord IS-11 (1984), notebook
Full list of products of Sord Computer Corporation

References

External links

Sord Computer Corporation homepage
(in Japanese) {{Authority control Defunct computer hardware companies Defunct companies of Japan Electronics companies of Japan Computer companies established in 1970 1970 establishments in Japan