5 ms·
I have a theory about the Japanese and their relationship to the PC, having lived there for a bit in the mid 90s. This comes down to three things: First, Japan
by blacktriangle 5y ago
I have a theory about the Japanese and their relationship to the PC, having lived there for a bit in the mid 90s. This comes down to three things:
First, Japan had a mindblowing consumer electronics industry way before we did. There were special purpose devices for everything you could want. They were all user friendly and did not require understanding how the underlying system worked. They didn't need a PC since all their electronic needs were already met and met better.
Second, Japan is basically 99% urban living, as space is at an insane premium, and even when you are in the country the houses are built small due to culture and lack of open space, since if you're not in the city you're probably in the mountains. This means there was no physical place to even put a PC in most Japanese houses the way American houses might have a desk in a corner or even an office.
Third, and probably the most important, phone calls in Japan were always pay by minute, even for local calls. This meant that if you were online with a modem, you were paying the phone bill just sitting there. This meant that if a person even had a modem, the would rarely use the internet. Since America had monthly-billed phones, there was no problem staying up all night on AOL chatrooms, and AOL really was the killer app that pushed PCs into American houses.
IMO this is why the PC revolution that really took off in American homes, and by association a bunch of us who cut our teeth mucking about with bat files so we could play our DOS games and ended up learning useful skills out of necessity never happened in Japan.
- jonny_eh 5y agoFascinating. I wonder if the lack of early internet usage led to their companies falling behind on providing competitive internet services. I'm thinking of otherwise innovative companies like Nintendo and Sony that were very late to the game compared to their Western competitors.
- fomine3 5y agoI don't think phone calls makes huge difference for current situation. Flat rate calling plan only for night was available in 90s (but yeah it's for nerds so your point is vaild). ADSL were widely available in about 2001-2006. FTTH is now virtually available everywhere (except some condos with fragile "free" internet).
- blacktriangle 5y agoThe timing is huge. There was a period time from the late 80s to I'd say Win98 when computers became affordable, they were useable by laypeople, but they still weren't easy yet. You still had to learn about some of the underlying ideas to do anything useful. By 2001 user-focused OSes had gotten figured out to the point where they mostly worked and people needed to know less and less about the underlying technology. The key really was that brief time period where hardware had finally become widely available but software was still catching up with the new mass market.
- nikau 5y agoThey also skipped PCs and went straight to doing web tasks on cell phones. I remember going there in 2001 and imode websites were already in heavy use with the people I met, whereas at home they were trying to push WAP but it was too expensive to get traction.