Closest I ever got to Japanese computers was using an IBM JX in primary school. That's a variant of the IBM PCjr – the biggest difference is, unlike the PCjr, i

Closest I ever got to Japanese computers was using an IBM JX in primary school. That's a variant of the IBM PCjr – the biggest difference is, unlike the PCjr, it had a proper keyboard, and by default 3.5-inch floppies rather than 5.25-inch. It was primarily sold in Japan – but also to schools in Australia and New Zealand. The Australia/NZ model was missing the extra memory and Kanji-specific display hardware that the Japanese model came with. http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/03/ibm-jx-ibm-pcjr-20-revised-article.html http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/2021/03/ibm-jx-ibm-pcjr-... One other (even bigger) way in which Japanese computer technology influenced Australia, was that Fujitsu had a lot of success selling their clone IBM mainframes here in the 1980s/1990s. The university I went to – and later became staff member at – had used one. By the time I joined the staff, it had already been thrown out, but I remember discovering all this evidence of its past existence left behind – masses of tangled bus and tag cables under the data centre floor tiles, a storeroom full of 9 track backup tapes, etc. Fujitsu's mainframes mostly didn't run MVS (although they could), they ran OSIV/MSP, Fujitsu's "clone" of MVS with significantly reduced licensing costs. However, the reason why it was cheaper, is it wasn't actually a clone – Fujitsu had illegally stolen the source code to MVS from IBM. They tried to cover it up by doing things like changing the copyright notices (apparently they forgot a few though), and they also renamed a lot of the OS modules and commands – the modules of MVS' timesharing component, TSO, mostly start with the prefix IKJ, Fujitsu renamed them all to start with PDE instead; they renamed the IBM catalog management utility, IDCAMS, to KQCAMS; etc–which meant most MVS software could work, but only after a bunch of search-and-replace changes to its code. IBM saw right past this feeble cover-up attempt, and Fujitsu (and Hitachi too, which did the same independently) ended up paying IBM many hundreds of millions of dollars to settle the resulting lawsuits. That was likely one of the factors resulting in Fujitsu pulling out of the mainframe market in Australia, and most of its customers either went to non-mainframe platforms (UNIX/Windows/Linux), or else to IBM's mainframe operating systems (MVS / OS/390 / z/OS). Fujitsu's mainframe OS and hardware still survive in Japan, but are stuck on 31-bit – they never made the investment which IBM did to add 64-bit support (with the release of z/OS in 2001).