History of Fujitsu

The company was established in 1935 under the name Fuji Tsu-shinki Seizo, Fuji Telecommunications Equipment Manufacturing), a spinoff of the Fuji Electric Company, this in turn being a joint venture between the Furukawa Electric Company and German conglomerate Siemens. Despite its connections to the Furukawa zaibatsu, Fujitsu escaped the Allied occupation of Japan mostly unscathed.

In 1954 Fujitsu manufactured Japan’s first computer, the FACOM 100, and in 1961 the transistorized FACOM 222. In 1967, the company’s name was officially changed to the contraction Fujitsu.

In 1955, Fujitsu founded Kawasaki Frontale as a Fujitsu soccer club. Kawasaki Frontale has now been a J. League football club since 1999.

After 1981 Fujitsu gradually took over International Computers Ltd (ICL) , which was renamed to Fujitsu Services Limited in 2002.

From February 1989 until the Summer of 1997 Fujitsu built the FM Towns PC variant. It started as a proprietary PC variant intended for multimedia applications and computer games, but later became more compatible with regular PCs. In 1993, the FM Towns Marty was released, a gaming console compatible with the FM Towns games.

Amdahl became a wholly owned subsidiary of Fujitsu in 1997.

The active partnership with Siemens AG was revived in 1999 in the form of Fujitsu Siemens Computers, now Europe’s largest IT supplier, and owned 50/50 by Fujitsu and Siemens.

On March 2, 2004, Fujitsu Computer Products of America lost a class action lawsuit over hard disk drives with defective chips and firmware.