It took a while for the average engineer at Sharp Corp. to tune into the idea of the company dumping cathode-ray tube televisions by 2005.
But that decision in summer 1998 marked the birth of a new core business for the Osaka-headquartered electronics giant -- liquid-crystal displays.
"We were flabbergasted," Masatsugu Teragawa, an engineer and general manager of the LCD digital systems division, recalled. "We never thought LCDs could replace CRTs as a display unit for TVs."