Lots of good memories and insights in this article. The 80s and 90s were a time of interesting experimentation in the Japanese PC market. Sadly it eventually

Lots of good memories and insights in this article. The 80s and 90s were a time of interesting experimentation in the Japanese PC market. Sadly it eventually it converged into the grey goo of baseline Wintel, just as the contemporaneous and exciting world of keitai just ended up as the same boring smartphones as everywhere else. Standardization of things like POSIX and languages ironically has the effect of reducing extensions -- most people write to the standard for maximum portability. I do it too. I'm not a fan of single-implementation languages* (python, pearl, go, rust etc) but at least they do hark back to a time when languages really were written with greater programmer affordances (just as CISC machines had all sorts of affordances for writing applications in assembly code, such as BCD instructions, string maninipulation, etc). * Yes, I know about gccgo and rust-gcc but both were written to be compatible with the original implementation rather than to an independent standard. So de facto those are single-implementation languages.