The task of creating a notebook was given to the Yamato Facility in Japan, headed by Arimasa Naitoh ( 内藤在正, Naitō Arimasa, now Lenovo Fellow and vice president of Lenovo's PC and Smart Devices business unit), a Japanese engineer and product designer who had joined IBM in the 1970s, now known as the 'Father of ThinkPad'.
The ThinkPad was developed to compete with Toshiba and Compaq, who had created the first two portable notebooks, with an emphasis on sales to the Harvard Business School.
