12 ms·

What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?

287 points by zdw 2y ago

0xbadcafebee 2y ago
I never thought about this before, but product competition is basically evolution in action. Entities with more desirable traits that adapt better to a given ecosystem survive, the rest don't. (In addition to things like a pre-existing dominant species having advantages over new ones) (fwiw, Windows won out because it had better business strategy. Apple wanted to be in everyone's homes; Microsoft wanted to be in everyone's business. One of those is easier to sell to in bulk, and easier to charge more money. In addition, Windows being more hardware-agnostic, and encouraging an ecosystem of competing hardware manufacturers, allowed them to invest less in hardware themselves, while creating an industry that would vie for business on Microsoft's behalf. This is of course different than the "workstation" market of uber-high-powered individual computers, which sort-of still exists, though with PC hardware)
- bane 2y ago
  Yes! And it's very interesting to consider two additional things: 1. how seemingly "less capable" technologies win out in this evolutionary environment 2. how plentiful VC (and to some extent government funding for R&D) distorts normal "evolutionary" forces in a market
  - 0134340 2y ago
    1. In that case those that were adopted tended to be the cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies, ie, at a biological level just more calorically cheaper to adopt and perhaps efficient to maintain. 2. VC and general funding, ie supporting an entity, is a feature of evolution. I guess I expected better of HN but it seems people don't realize that nothing we can do will stop evolution and everything we do is just a feature of it.
  - 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
    Yeah; I think it's our ego, or "common sense", that makes us think that the most advanced thing will win out in the end. In reality it's the most well-adapted thing that wins out in the long term. If you ever see a thing and think "this is really advanced, this must be the future", think again. I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. The economy is the climate, and the laws, politics, people, culture are the landscape. That ecosystem includes VCs along with all the other things. Within that environment, the best adapted thing survives. Sadly, that "thing" (a corporation, for example) may make poor decisions that lead to its demise, the way a snow leopard leaping for a goat on a mountain side may make them both tumble to their doom. Nature's a cruel mistress. I could even see something like Soviet Russia being an ecosystem that evolution still happens in. It's a very extreme environment, to be sure, but evolution still happens in the most extreme environments on earth.
    - bane 2y ago
      > I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. I'm definitely not claiming that evolution doesn't occur, but that the temporary supply of capital that VCs (and similar sources) supply creates an artificial environment that creates distorted evolutionary pressures. When the VC money runs out, and technologies are "returned to a natural ecosystem", the end result is often not that the VC funded tech was the fittest in the market. Meanwhile, if a particular technology consumed the market by distorting its fitness function and eliminates otherwise healthy competitors along the way, the VC backed tech might survive in the end, but it's not clear that it would be the fittest given natural market forces. However, everybody else is dead. To really stretch this analogy, it's a bit like an environment with several predatory cat species - each good at a particular strategy. One day a team of hunters comes in, kills all the prey, and selects a specific cat species as "the champion" and simply feeds it in captivity. Once the rest of the cat species die off, they release the champion into the wild where lack of competition stalls its own further evolution. What cat would have been the "best" in the given ecosystem? Nobody knows. There's a few interesting cases around this. Palantir comes to mind as a particularly useful case. They entered a market with a dozen competitors all surviving in the market, flooded it with something like 13 or 14 rounds of fundraising's worth of product, nearly annihilated everybody else in the market and when finally released to the wild, found that their signature product line was no longer what the market wanted at the size of the market the VCs had assumed. Today the company more or less acts as a bespoke web application company. Mimic competitors like C3.ai are also suffering under similar fates. For a government funded use-case look no further than the space launch market. For decades it was funded by dumb government money and regulations that gave the appearance of a competitive market but was intended more to ensure strategic options. Those companies evolved/optimized to capture this steady supply of crippled prey money but it really created a bunch of sick, inbred, organizations. SpaceX appears, acts like a hungry wild tiger in a room full of Pugs and proceeds to dismantle them all, while building new markets and capturing the easy prey dripping out of the government funnel. There's no magic physics to SpaceX, all of the competencies existed in the industrial pipeline, but the government funding mechanism evolved them in unnatural ways. SpaceX, being heavily government funded, may yet evolve into one of those, but for the moment it's the difference between a Wolf and a domesticated small apartment dog.
- acdha 2y ago
  Windows also won by parasitizing a previously bigger host (Bill Gates’ mother was on IBM’s board), and shutting out competition by forcing vendors not to offer other companies’ software if they wanted Microsoft licenses at better than retail pricing.
  - inquirerGeneral 2y ago
    [dead]
  - nine_k 2y ago
    This is how MS-DOS and early Windows won. But the first version of MS Excel was written for MacOS. And it's MSO what's holding businesses on Windows, not the other way around.
    - orionblastar 2y ago
      MSO doesn't work in WINE at least the latest versions don't.
      - smegger001 2y ago
        I recall being told that office uses undocumented Windows APIs making it harder for groups like WINE and Proton to support them. whether or not thats the intent or a happy accident well...
  - canucker2016 2y ago
    Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, was not an IBM board member. She was on the national United Way's executive committee. Also an executive committee member was IBM's Chairman, John Opel. see https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-... [edit] also Windows OEMs always got lower than retail price for Windows licenses (assuming your volume sold was high enough) from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#The_%22Windows_tax%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#... : ==== Microsoft once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included. Beginning in 1983, Microsoft sold MS-DOS licenses to OEMs on an individually negotiated basis. The contracts required OEMs to purchase a number of MS-DOS licenses equal to or greater than the number of computers sold, with the result of zero marginal cost for OEMs to include MS-DOS. Installing an operating system other than MS-DOS would effectively require double payment of operating system royalties. Also, Microsoft penalized OEMs that installed alternative operating systems by making their license terms less favorable. Microsoft entered into a consent decree in 1994 that barred them from conditioning the availability of Windows licenses or varying their prices based on whether OEMs distributed other operating systems. ... In 2009, Microsoft stated that it has always charged OEMs about $50 for a Windows license on a $1,000 computer. ====
- 0134340 2y ago
  And entities that become too great and harmful to other entities (monopolistic) get challenged, even if they can provide some good, and from that challenge they sometimes get parasitized as well. Business competition, therefore human behavior, is natural no matter what way you want to politicize it.
- hedora 2y ago
  I first figured this out when looking at filesystems. Ext4 is a generation behind netapp wafl (from the 1990s). ZFS is arguably competitive with some of the enterprise filers from back when sun existed. There have been at least four generations of commercial filesystems since then. So, a randomly chosen on-prem filer will be 3-5 generations ahead of Linux. The reason is economic: In that space, companies have a half life of 5 years, but influential open source filesystems last 20+ years.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    ZFS would almost certainly be more widely adopted were it under a different license. But Red Hat, for one, wasn't going to touch it given CDDL.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  We're talking about international trade, so trade barriers and foreign policies play a huge role that go beyond simple competition. Japan had a hell of a time to deal with car exports in the US, SONY still won but the reaction to it was also extremely strong. A Japanese company had absolutely no chance to go hit the US market and displace companies like SUN, Apple or IBM on the US soil. In particular software IP is a whole lot harder to fight for than manufacturing IP (even if it gets stolen, it's moot if it can't be physically applied. In software land reproduction is a given) Europe wasn't much an easier target either. We saw that later with docomo failing miserably while having a clearly superior product. In reverse the US has a long history of opening the Japanese market when they really want to, and forgoing that market isn't critical either, so there's quite an asymmetry. The only ground Japanese company learned to properly fight has been video games so far.
  - mcdow 2y ago
    Could you speak more to the US “opening the Japanese market when they really want to”? I’m not familiar with this.
    - makeitdouble 2y ago
      A bit far from the technology related fields, but the beef import agreements are the most explicit on this part [0]. US beef was found in clear violation of the safety rules multiple times, but Japan had to bend anyway ("The government has put priority on the political schedule between the two countries, not on food safety or human health."). Japan is typically not doing great in its relationship with Korea or China, or even India, nor the EU really (France and Germany are closely friendly, but won't give much economic benefits), so the US have a pretty strong leverage when it comes to negociations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_Japan#:~:text=After%20multiple%20beef%20import%20restrictions%20in%20Japan%2C%20the,to%20a%20single%20BSE%20case%20in%20Washington.%20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_... PS: there's a mountain of other reasons now, but Japan and Russia were also not doing great as they've been fighting over the northern islands for decades. To my eyes they really really suck at international relations in general.
    - 2y ago
permo-w 2y ago
is "PC platform" the standard term here? I'm not saying it isn't, it just sounds a little odd to me.
- bane 2y ago
  Yes, it stands for "Personal Computer Platform".
  - permo-w 2y ago
    thanks internet autism
bane 2y ago
I think this somewhat misses an important nuance. Japanese PCs had to be different early on because of the complexities of the written language. All of the important characters could be handled in just a few bits (7 or 8) and low resolution in Western markets, with different fonts and character maps dropped in to support a few different alphabets. But in CJK countries, things were much harder and the entire I/O system had to be significantly more capable than what might pass for usable elsewhere. This meant larger ROMs, larger framebuffers, higher resolution displays, more complex keyboarding systems, the works. Everything was harder and more expensive for a long time. A common add-on was ROMs with Kanji (Chinese derived characters) support in the same way a person in the West might buy a new sound card or get a VGA card. Except this was just so you could use your new $1200 computer (in today's money) to write things on. Back then, given limited memory, you also ended up with a ton of different display modes that offered different tradeoffs between color, resolution, and refresh. Because of the complex character sets, these Japanese systems tended to focus on fewer colors and higher resolution while the west focused on more colors at a lower res in the same or less memory space (any fans of mode 13h?). The first PC-98 (the 9801) shipped in 1982 with 128k of RAM and a 640x400 display with special display hardware. The equivalent IBM-PC shipped with 16KB of RAM and CGA graphics which could give you a display no higher than 640x200 with 1-bit colors but was mostly used in 320x200 with 4 (terrible) colors. Even with similar base architectures, these formative differences meant that lots of the guts of the systems were laid out different to accommodate this -- especially in the memory maps. By the time "conventional" PCs were able to handle the character display needs (sometime in the mid-90s), they were selling in the millions of units per anum which drove down their per unit prices. The Japanese market was severely fractured and in a smaller addressable market. Per unit costs were higher, but the software was largely the same. Porting the same businessware to half a dozen platforms cost too much. So now the average user of the Japanese systems had a smaller library of software which was more or less a copy of what was on IBM PCs, on more expensive hardware -- market forces solved the rest. (btw, the FM Towns, IIR, also had specialized graphics hardware to produce arcade-like graphics with tiles and sprites and so on, making it even more different) Some of this history also informs why home computing lagged in Japan compared to the West despite having all of the other prerequisites for it to take off. graphics https://www.pc98.org/ https://www.pc98.org/ memory maps https://radioc.web.fc2.com/column/pc98bas/pc98memmap_en.htm https://radioc.web.fc2.com/column/pc98bas/pc98memmap_en.htm https://wiki.osdev.org/Memory_Map_(x86) https://wiki.osdev.org/Memory_Map_(x86)
Apocryphon 2y ago
Also worth watching: Why is Japan So Weak in Software? by Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso
- terminalgravity 2y ago
  I wish there was a TL;DW bot to summarize a videos like this. I’m curious but not in a place i could easily watch a video.
  - drekipus 2y ago
    Watch later
  - TowerTall 2y ago
    Someone posted this link on HN a short while ago https://www.tldw.pro/ https://www.tldw.pro/
  - cglong 2y ago
    You can ask Gemini to summarize a YouTube video for you! Also if you have YouTube Premium on Android, you can ask questions about the current video. Here's Gemini's summary of GP's video: https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f
    - hedora 2y ago
      Alibaba just released 100 large models. One takes a 20 second video and summarizes it. Now I wonder if it supports audio. If so, I want the relevant browser plugin so I can read YouTube on my machine!
  - chmod775 2y ago
    Asianometry's videos are good precisely because of the detail and background he goes into. If you summarize them you take that away and pretty much just end up with what has already been said here.
PhasmaFelis 2y ago
I was gonna say, the same thing that happened to all the western PC platforms that weren't Microsoft or Apple. Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and probably dozens of others I've never heard of. As computers became more powerful and development costs rose, small-market architectures and OSes simply became unsustainable. You had to either reach sustained global success or die. I'm sure there were some unique challenges for architectures that mainly served Japan, but I doubt they were that much worse than the ones facing the ones that mainly served, say, Britain. All of them lost the race in the end. The same thing happened again with graphical cellphones! In the flip-phone era there were a zillion different OSes with their own app libraries. For a while it looked like Blackberry was set to be the Microsoft of the upcoming smartphone era, and then Apple stole their thunder, and no one could compete except Android and Windows Phone, and then Windows Phone dropped out too, and now we're back to two basic architectures with no meaningful competitors, just like the home PC market by 1996. > By 1994 though, they had a problem: the 32-bit consoles were out, which could do 2D games just as well as the FM Towns and X68000, and the consoles could also do 3D that blew away anything those computers could handle. This line from the article caught my eye in particular, because it's similar to what happened to Commodore's Amiga, one of the last real Microsoft competitors in the West. Essentially, Doom killed it. There's a rather tragic list of Amiga games that struggled valiantly to be Doom on that platform, and some of them were pretty good but none of them could really match what Id could with a tricked-out DOS machine in 1993, and that was more or less that.
- TacticalCoder 2y ago
  > Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and probably dozens of others I've never heard of. Let's not forget the french. They had Oric, Matra (IIRC), Thomson and... The Minitel. And now they're absolutely nowhere to be seen, just like Japan: it's either PCs (basically running Windows or a Un*x) or Macs.
  - Narishma 2y ago
    Oric was British.
BoingBoomTschak 2y ago
How about the US and MS ruining everything as usual? "In April 1989 the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a preliminary report accusing BTRON of being a trade barrier, as it only functioned in Japan, and asked the Japanese government not to make it standard in schools. TRON was included along with rice, semiconductors, and telecommunications equipment in a list of items targeted by Super-301 (complete stop of import based on section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988). It was removed from the list after the USTR inspection team visited the TRON Association in May. In June the Japanese government expressed their regret at U.S. intervention but accepted this request not to make it standard in schools, thus ending the BTRON project. Callon opines that the project had nevertheless run into such difficulties that the U.S. intervention allowed the government to save face from cancelling the project. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard. In the 1980s Microsoft had at least once lobbied Washington about TRON until backing off, but Ken Sakamura himself believed Microsoft wasn't the impetus behind the Super-301 listing in 1989. Known for his off the cuff remarks, in 2004 governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara mentioned in his column post concerning international trade policy that TRON was dropped because Carla Anderson Hills had threatened Ryutaro Hashimoto over it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  No; Japan would have eventually stumbled and fell into obscurity even without any American interference. It's a running joke at this point, because Japanese cannot compromise quality to make costs reasonable. In an environment where the world produces goods 80~90% as good as Japanese ones for 1/4th~1/8th the cost, who in their right mind buys Japanese? This is what happened to Japan's entire electronics industry, home appliance industry, and more. Japan still has a domestic computer industry by a technicality (it's all Made In China) primarily fended over by Hitachi and Panasonic, but most westerners likely won't know because they simply don't sell overseas. I'm not going to bother getting into how Japanese are horrible with software too.
initramfs 2y ago
https://j-core.org/ https://j-core.org/ "What is this processor? The SuperH processor is a Japanese design developed by Hitachi in the late 1990's. As a second generation hybrid RISC design it was easier for compilers to generate good code for than earlier RISC chips, and it recaptured much of the code density of earlier CISC designs by using fixed length 16 bit instructions (with 32 bit register size and address space), using microcoding to allow some instructions to perform multiple clock cycles of work. (Earlier pure risc designs used one instruction per clock cycle even when that served no purpose but to make the code bigger and exhaust the encoding space.) Hitachi developed 4 generations of SuperH. SH2 made it to the United states in the Sega Saturn game console, and SH4 powered the Sega Dreamcast. They were also widely used in areas outside the US cosumer market, such as the japanese automative industry. But during the height of SuperH's development, the 1997 asian economic crisis caused Hitachi to tighten its belt, eventually partnering with Mitsubishi to spin off its microprocessor division into a new company called "Renesas". This new company did not inherit the Hitachi engineers who had designed SuperH, and Renesas' own attempts at further development on SuperH didn't even interest enough customers for the result to go ito production. Eventually Renesas moved on to new designs it had developed entirely in-house, and SuperH receded in importance to them... until the patents expired."
- kjs3 2y ago
  The SH4 is a really interesting chip, with some embryonic vector instruction. There are also SH variants with a DSP bolted on.
- mikepurvis 2y ago
  Interesting point of history— the H8 processor is the MCU that powers the original Lego Mindstorms RCX. In high school I wrote some assembly language for it when making a robot that ran on BrickOS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS
  - kn100 2y ago
    a slightly different (but close enough) Hitachi CPU also powered the Cybiko - a wacky games console few have heard of. I tried writing a disassembler for that particular cpu a while back. Was an interesting platform and oh man the documentation at least to me was gorgeous: github.com/kn100/cybemu/
RajT88 2y ago
As an aside my recent trip to Japan, I hit up all the crazy gaming stores hoping to find an FM Towns or the even more rare FM Towns Marty. They looked at me like I was a three headed monkey.
- mappu 2y ago
  I looked around too - Mandarake only had popular consoles; Super Potato in Akihabara and Retro TV Game Revival in Osaka had MSX, but no FM Towns. The store clerk read my enquiry off Google Translate on my phone and gave me a one-word reply: いいえ. It probably takes local expertise to find one in someone's attic. Playing its Lupin III exclusive game might have to remain a MAME job.
  - pezezin 2y ago
    If you are looking for retrocomputers in Akihabara, the place to visit is BEEP. It is the only shops that specializes in that kind of stuff.
- Tiktaalik 2y ago
  I did see some old PCs of that sort at Hard-off further afield. I don't recall where. May have been in the burbs around Osaka. In Tokyo the easily accessible source to have a peek at some computers like this is BEEP in Akihabara. Edit: Yep looking through my photos I saw an FM Towns Marty at a Hard Off in Kanazawa. ¥49500. Saw an actual FM Towns at a Hard off in Hachioji. More ¥77000 when you combine the monitor and computer. That last big Eco Town in Hachioji was quite the old PC source. Also had a PC 98 and boxed (!) X68000.
  - RajT88 2y ago
    > ¥49500 At current exchange rate, that is a steal! Kanazawa is... Sadly not typically a place you go if you're on a brief visit of a couple weeks. When I was studying abroad in 2001, I saw an original FM Towns tower case basically in the junk pile. I wanted it even then for how distinctive it was, but had no clue what it was. What might have been!
- 2y ago
tantalor 2y ago
This would be much more comprehensible if the author would include some dates.
fnord77 2y ago
sadly, no pics. The FM Towns was kinda cool looking
nisten 2y ago
they got old
pyeri 2y ago
Anyone remembers Toshiba laptops? Their build quality was top-notch and they were quite durable at the price point they came. Then around 2012-14, they started disappearing from the market, what happened to them?
- lifeformed 2y ago
  They rebranded to Dynabook I think?
  - pyeri 2y ago
    Just Googled and came to know they sold their stake in PC division to another Japanese company called Sharp in 2018, this Sharp then later rebranded as Dynabook. But it no longer has the same traction as original Toshiba, nor is it available on most online ecommerce stores.
    - rvba 2y ago
      Can someone with a background in marketing explain why so many companies drop their recognizable brand names and start using other names, which have lower market penetation? My theory is either mergers/spinoffs.. or someone in markering wants to get a bonus, so they kill the brand. Someone at blizzard wanted to rename battle.net to blizzard app for example
      - ghaff 2y ago
        There are a lot Of reasons, often not good ones, but it’s often the case that the existing brand doesn’t really represent what the company does any longer or is too narrow. Of course it may just be a marketing VP who wants a prestige project on their resume.
      - simne 2y ago
        Cause could be regulations, or some bigger brand strict rules. For example, anti-monopoly regulators looking very formal, when somebody appear to share more than 30% of market, then just turn on prohibitively high taxes. Other example, Nintendo limited number of games published from one brand, so big companies have created daughter companies who formally own some of IP.
Razengan 2y ago
In a YouTube video about the history of OS/2, I learned that ole Microsoft back in the 1990s before their mob tactics were curtailed, used to send suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers to chastise them for even offering users the mere option of buying PCs with OS/2 instead of Windows.. Could such practices have stifled the innovation and growth within the Japanese PC industry? They did have some takes of their own on the PC platform with that unique Japanese flavor, in series like the PC-8800/PC-98, FM Towns, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-8800_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-8800_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns Who knows what more they could've done if Windows 95 hadn't smothered everything under the sun? Like the ill-deserved demise of the Commodore Amiga, this seems like a failure of politics than merit.
- FMecha 2y ago
  >In a YouTube video about the history of OS/2, I learned that ole Microsoft back in the 1990s before their mob tactics were curtailed, used to send suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers to chastise them for even offering users the mere option of buying PCs with OS/2 instead of Windows.. That, out of context, gives an impression-implication of Microsoft's Japanese operations having ties with the yakuza. And for PC-98 and FM Towns, versions of Windows were available for them (with FM Towns' uniqueness diminishing gradually as Fujitsu embraced DOS/V).
JSR_FDED 2y ago
I remember working in Taiwan in the late nineties and noticed that the PE2 editor for MSDOS was incredibly popular, because you could easily define macros that mapped to multi-character sequences, which combined with a BIOS that had character tables for simplified Chinese meant you could generate Chinese text without too much difficulty. To this day my vimrc has some of those PE2 macros :-)
amelius 2y ago
> The thing about DOS is that it’s a much thinner OS than what we think of in 2024. When you’re writing DOS software of any kind of complexity, you’re talking straight to the hardware, or to drivers that are specific to particular classes of hardware. How is that different from how we access our GPUs nowadays?
- bitmasher9 2y ago
  Today we access GPUs through standard APIs like DirectX, CUDA, OpenGL etc. In DOS there wasn’t these standards, and you had to write code for specific hardware.
  - amelius 2y ago
    True, but our OS has no idea what processes run on which GPU, or how much GPU memory they use. Everything on the GPU happens behind the back of the OS.
    - TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
      That's not true, the kernel driver knows what page mappings belong to particular processes, including GPU page mappings. Moreover, you have no choice but to talk to that kernel driver; you can't go behind its back and talk truly directly to the GPU, even if you bypass the userspace GPU driver, because this would allow circumventing memory protection. It is true, however, that modern GPU kernel drivers are relatively thin.
  - DaoVeles 2y ago
    This is why DOS games that supported 3DFX just talked directly to the GPU. They documented all the registers mapping for direct access. Didn't even need to install drivers. DOS was in its twilight years at that point, Nvidia/ATI didn't bother with DOS support so they just kept them behind OpenGL/DirectX.
DrNosferatu 2y ago
I guess Unicode happened?
DrNosferatu 2y ago
The MSX in Japan had a Japanese character set. Was this good enough for mainstream word processing needs? Really curious to know! PS: I mean letters, essays, etc - not DTP.
- phonon 2y ago
  https://www.msx.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_Word_Processors https://www.msx.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_Word_Processors
pnw 2y ago
Some of the Japanese PC platforms were sold in Australia. Shout-out to the Hitachi Peach, a curious 6809 machine reminiscent of an Apple II. My high school friends father purchased one (it was cheaper than an actual PC) and we spent many weekends coding on it but it was very difficult to find much info beyond the manual. IIRC it had Microsoft Basic but a proprietary OS. Parts of the manual were still in Japanese. It all seemed so exotic at the time.

287 points by zdw 2y ago

I never thought about this before, but product competition is basically evolution in action. Entities with more desirable traits that adapt better to a given ecosystem survive, the rest don't. (In addition to things like a pre-existing dominant species having advantages over new ones) (fwiw, Windows won out because it had better business strategy. Apple wanted to be in everyone's homes; Microsoft wanted to be in everyone's business. One of those is easier to sell to in bulk, and easier to charge more money. In addition, Windows being more hardware-agnostic, and encouraging an ecosystem of competing hardware manufacturers, allowed them to invest less in hardware themselves, while creating an industry that would vie for business on Microsoft's behalf. This is of course different than the "workstation" market of uber-high-powered individual computers, which sort-of still exists, though with PC hardware)

bane 2y ago
Yes! And it's very interesting to consider two additional things: 1. how seemingly "less capable" technologies win out in this evolutionary environment 2. how plentiful VC (and to some extent government funding for R&D) distorts normal "evolutionary" forces in a market
- 0134340 2y ago
  1. In that case those that were adopted tended to be the cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies, ie, at a biological level just more calorically cheaper to adopt and perhaps efficient to maintain. 2. VC and general funding, ie supporting an entity, is a feature of evolution. I guess I expected better of HN but it seems people don't realize that nothing we can do will stop evolution and everything we do is just a feature of it.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y ago
  Yeah; I think it's our ego, or "common sense", that makes us think that the most advanced thing will win out in the end. In reality it's the most well-adapted thing that wins out in the long term. If you ever see a thing and think "this is really advanced, this must be the future", think again. I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. The economy is the climate, and the laws, politics, people, culture are the landscape. That ecosystem includes VCs along with all the other things. Within that environment, the best adapted thing survives. Sadly, that "thing" (a corporation, for example) may make poor decisions that lead to its demise, the way a snow leopard leaping for a goat on a mountain side may make them both tumble to their doom. Nature's a cruel mistress. I could even see something like Soviet Russia being an ecosystem that evolution still happens in. It's a very extreme environment, to be sure, but evolution still happens in the most extreme environments on earth.
  - bane 2y ago
    > I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. I'm definitely not claiming that evolution doesn't occur, but that the temporary supply of capital that VCs (and similar sources) supply creates an artificial environment that creates distorted evolutionary pressures. When the VC money runs out, and technologies are "returned to a natural ecosystem", the end result is often not that the VC funded tech was the fittest in the market. Meanwhile, if a particular technology consumed the market by distorting its fitness function and eliminates otherwise healthy competitors along the way, the VC backed tech might survive in the end, but it's not clear that it would be the fittest given natural market forces. However, everybody else is dead. To really stretch this analogy, it's a bit like an environment with several predatory cat species - each good at a particular strategy. One day a team of hunters comes in, kills all the prey, and selects a specific cat species as "the champion" and simply feeds it in captivity. Once the rest of the cat species die off, they release the champion into the wild where lack of competition stalls its own further evolution. What cat would have been the "best" in the given ecosystem? Nobody knows. There's a few interesting cases around this. Palantir comes to mind as a particularly useful case. They entered a market with a dozen competitors all surviving in the market, flooded it with something like 13 or 14 rounds of fundraising's worth of product, nearly annihilated everybody else in the market and when finally released to the wild, found that their signature product line was no longer what the market wanted at the size of the market the VCs had assumed. Today the company more or less acts as a bespoke web application company. Mimic competitors like C3.ai are also suffering under similar fates. For a government funded use-case look no further than the space launch market. For decades it was funded by dumb government money and regulations that gave the appearance of a competitive market but was intended more to ensure strategic options. Those companies evolved/optimized to capture this steady supply of crippled prey money but it really created a bunch of sick, inbred, organizations. SpaceX appears, acts like a hungry wild tiger in a room full of Pugs and proceeds to dismantle them all, while building new markets and capturing the easy prey dripping out of the government funnel. There's no magic physics to SpaceX, all of the competencies existed in the industrial pipeline, but the government funding mechanism evolved them in unnatural ways. SpaceX, being heavily government funded, may yet evolve into one of those, but for the moment it's the difference between a Wolf and a domesticated small apartment dog.
acdha 2y ago
Windows also won by parasitizing a previously bigger host (Bill Gates’ mother was on IBM’s board), and shutting out competition by forcing vendors not to offer other companies’ software if they wanted Microsoft licenses at better than retail pricing.
- inquirerGeneral 2y ago
  [dead]
- nine_k 2y ago
  This is how MS-DOS and early Windows won. But the first version of MS Excel was written for MacOS. And it's MSO what's holding businesses on Windows, not the other way around.
  - orionblastar 2y ago
    MSO doesn't work in WINE at least the latest versions don't.
    - smegger001 2y ago
      I recall being told that office uses undocumented Windows APIs making it harder for groups like WINE and Proton to support them. whether or not thats the intent or a happy accident well...
- canucker2016 2y ago
  Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, was not an IBM board member. She was on the national United Way's executive committee. Also an executive committee member was IBM's Chairman, John Opel. see https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-helped-her-son-start-microsoft.html https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-... [edit] also Windows OEMs always got lower than retail price for Windows licenses (assuming your volume sold was high enough) from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#The_%22Windows_tax%22 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#... : ==== Microsoft once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included. Beginning in 1983, Microsoft sold MS-DOS licenses to OEMs on an individually negotiated basis. The contracts required OEMs to purchase a number of MS-DOS licenses equal to or greater than the number of computers sold, with the result of zero marginal cost for OEMs to include MS-DOS. Installing an operating system other than MS-DOS would effectively require double payment of operating system royalties. Also, Microsoft penalized OEMs that installed alternative operating systems by making their license terms less favorable. Microsoft entered into a consent decree in 1994 that barred them from conditioning the availability of Windows licenses or varying their prices based on whether OEMs distributed other operating systems. ... In 2009, Microsoft stated that it has always charged OEMs about $50 for a Windows license on a $1,000 computer. ====
0134340 2y ago
And entities that become too great and harmful to other entities (monopolistic) get challenged, even if they can provide some good, and from that challenge they sometimes get parasitized as well. Business competition, therefore human behavior, is natural no matter what way you want to politicize it.
hedora 2y ago
I first figured this out when looking at filesystems. Ext4 is a generation behind netapp wafl (from the 1990s). ZFS is arguably competitive with some of the enterprise filers from back when sun existed. There have been at least four generations of commercial filesystems since then. So, a randomly chosen on-prem filer will be 3-5 generations ahead of Linux. The reason is economic: In that space, companies have a half life of 5 years, but influential open source filesystems last 20+ years.
- ghaff 2y ago
  ZFS would almost certainly be more widely adopted were it under a different license. But Red Hat, for one, wasn't going to touch it given CDDL.
makeitdouble 2y ago
We're talking about international trade, so trade barriers and foreign policies play a huge role that go beyond simple competition. Japan had a hell of a time to deal with car exports in the US, SONY still won but the reaction to it was also extremely strong. A Japanese company had absolutely no chance to go hit the US market and displace companies like SUN, Apple or IBM on the US soil. In particular software IP is a whole lot harder to fight for than manufacturing IP (even if it gets stolen, it's moot if it can't be physically applied. In software land reproduction is a given) Europe wasn't much an easier target either. We saw that later with docomo failing miserably while having a clearly superior product. In reverse the US has a long history of opening the Japanese market when they really want to, and forgoing that market isn't critical either, so there's quite an asymmetry. The only ground Japanese company learned to properly fight has been video games so far.
- mcdow 2y ago
  Could you speak more to the US “opening the Japanese market when they really want to”? I’m not familiar with this.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    A bit far from the technology related fields, but the beef import agreements are the most explicit on this part [0]. US beef was found in clear violation of the safety rules multiple times, but Japan had to bend anyway ("The government has put priority on the political schedule between the two countries, not on food safety or human health."). Japan is typically not doing great in its relationship with Korea or China, or even India, nor the EU really (France and Germany are closely friendly, but won't give much economic benefits), so the US have a pretty strong leverage when it comes to negociations. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_Japan#:~:text=After%20multiple%20beef%20import%20restrictions%20in%20Japan%2C%20the,to%20a%20single%20BSE%20case%20in%20Washington.%20 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_imports_in_... PS: there's a mountain of other reasons now, but Japan and Russia were also not doing great as they've been fighting over the northern islands for decades. To my eyes they really really suck at international relations in general.
  - 2y ago

permo-w 2y ago

is "PC platform" the standard term here? I'm not saying it isn't, it just sounds a little odd to me.

bane 2y ago
Yes, it stands for "Personal Computer Platform".
- permo-w 2y ago
  thanks internet autism

bane 2y ago

I think this somewhat misses an important nuance. Japanese PCs had to be different early on because of the complexities of the written language. All of the important characters could be handled in just a few bits (7 or 8) and low resolution in Western markets, with different fonts and character maps dropped in to support a few different alphabets. But in CJK countries, things were much harder and the entire I/O system had to be significantly more capable than what might pass for usable elsewhere. This meant larger ROMs, larger framebuffers, higher resolution displays, more complex keyboarding systems, the works. Everything was harder and more expensive for a long time. A common add-on was ROMs with Kanji (Chinese derived characters) support in the same way a person in the West might buy a new sound card or get a VGA card. Except this was just so you could use your new $1200 computer (in today's money) to write things on. Back then, given limited memory, you also ended up with a ton of different display modes that offered different tradeoffs between color, resolution, and refresh. Because of the complex character sets, these Japanese systems tended to focus on fewer colors and higher resolution while the west focused on more colors at a lower res in the same or less memory space (any fans of mode 13h?). The first PC-98 (the 9801) shipped in 1982 with 128k of RAM and a 640x400 display with special display hardware. The equivalent IBM-PC shipped with 16KB of RAM and CGA graphics which could give you a display no higher than 640x200 with 1-bit colors but was mostly used in 320x200 with 4 (terrible) colors. Even with similar base architectures, these formative differences meant that lots of the guts of the systems were laid out different to accommodate this -- especially in the memory maps. By the time "conventional" PCs were able to handle the character display needs (sometime in the mid-90s), they were selling in the millions of units per anum which drove down their per unit prices. The Japanese market was severely fractured and in a smaller addressable market. Per unit costs were higher, but the software was largely the same. Porting the same businessware to half a dozen platforms cost too much. So now the average user of the Japanese systems had a smaller library of software which was more or less a copy of what was on IBM PCs, on more expensive hardware -- market forces solved the rest. (btw, the FM Towns, IIR, also had specialized graphics hardware to produce arcade-like graphics with tiles and sprites and so on, making it even more different) Some of this history also informs why home computing lagged in Japan compared to the West despite having all of the other prerequisites for it to take off. graphics https://www.pc98.org/ https://www.pc98.org/ memory maps https://radioc.web.fc2.com/column/pc98bas/pc98memmap_en.htm https://radioc.web.fc2.com/column/pc98bas/pc98memmap_en.htm https://wiki.osdev.org/Memory_Map_(x86) https://wiki.osdev.org/Memory_Map_(x86)

Apocryphon 2y ago

Also worth watching: Why is Japan So Weak in Software? by Asianometry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso

terminalgravity 2y ago
I wish there was a TL;DW bot to summarize a videos like this. I’m curious but not in a place i could easily watch a video.
- drekipus 2y ago
  Watch later
- TowerTall 2y ago
  Someone posted this link on HN a short while ago https://www.tldw.pro/ https://www.tldw.pro/
- cglong 2y ago
  You can ask Gemini to summarize a YouTube video for you! Also if you have YouTube Premium on Android, you can ask questions about the current video. Here's Gemini's summary of GP's video: https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f
  - hedora 2y ago
    Alibaba just released 100 large models. One takes a 20 second video and summarizes it. Now I wonder if it supports audio. If so, I want the relevant browser plugin so I can read YouTube on my machine!
- chmod775 2y ago
  Asianometry's videos are good precisely because of the detail and background he goes into. If you summarize them you take that away and pretty much just end up with what has already been said here.

PhasmaFelis 2y ago

I was gonna say, the same thing that happened to all the western PC platforms that weren't Microsoft or Apple. Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and probably dozens of others I've never heard of. As computers became more powerful and development costs rose, small-market architectures and OSes simply became unsustainable. You had to either reach sustained global success or die. I'm sure there were some unique challenges for architectures that mainly served Japan, but I doubt they were that much worse than the ones facing the ones that mainly served, say, Britain. All of them lost the race in the end. The same thing happened again with graphical cellphones! In the flip-phone era there were a zillion different OSes with their own app libraries. For a while it looked like Blackberry was set to be the Microsoft of the upcoming smartphone era, and then Apple stole their thunder, and no one could compete except Android and Windows Phone, and then Windows Phone dropped out too, and now we're back to two basic architectures with no meaningful competitors, just like the home PC market by 1996. > By 1994 though, they had a problem: the 32-bit consoles were out, which could do 2D games just as well as the FM Towns and X68000, and the consoles could also do 3D that blew away anything those computers could handle. This line from the article caught my eye in particular, because it's similar to what happened to Commodore's Amiga, one of the last real Microsoft competitors in the West. Essentially, Doom killed it. There's a rather tragic list of Amiga games that struggled valiantly to be Doom on that platform, and some of them were pretty good but none of them could really match what Id could with a tricked-out DOS machine in 1993, and that was more or less that.

TacticalCoder 2y ago
> Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and probably dozens of others I've never heard of. Let's not forget the french. They had Oric, Matra (IIRC), Thomson and... The Minitel. And now they're absolutely nowhere to be seen, just like Japan: it's either PCs (basically running Windows or a Un*x) or Macs.
- Narishma 2y ago
  Oric was British.

BoingBoomTschak 2y ago

How about the US and MS ruining everything as usual? "In April 1989 the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a preliminary report accusing BTRON of being a trade barrier, as it only functioned in Japan, and asked the Japanese government not to make it standard in schools. TRON was included along with rice, semiconductors, and telecommunications equipment in a list of items targeted by Super-301 (complete stop of import based on section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988). It was removed from the list after the USTR inspection team visited the TRON Association in May. In June the Japanese government expressed their regret at U.S. intervention but accepted this request not to make it standard in schools, thus ending the BTRON project. Callon opines that the project had nevertheless run into such difficulties that the U.S. intervention allowed the government to save face from cancelling the project. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard. In the 1980s Microsoft had at least once lobbied Washington about TRON until backing off, but Ken Sakamura himself believed Microsoft wasn't the impetus behind the Super-301 listing in 1989. Known for his off the cuff remarks, in 2004 governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara mentioned in his column post concerning international trade policy that TRON was dropped because Carla Anderson Hills had threatened Ryutaro Hashimoto over it." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project

Dalewyn 2y ago
No; Japan would have eventually stumbled and fell into obscurity even without any American interference. It's a running joke at this point, because Japanese cannot compromise quality to make costs reasonable. In an environment where the world produces goods 80~90% as good as Japanese ones for 1/4th~1/8th the cost, who in their right mind buys Japanese? This is what happened to Japan's entire electronics industry, home appliance industry, and more. Japan still has a domestic computer industry by a technicality (it's all Made In China) primarily fended over by Hitachi and Panasonic, but most westerners likely won't know because they simply don't sell overseas. I'm not going to bother getting into how Japanese are horrible with software too.

initramfs 2y ago

https://j-core.org/ https://j-core.org/ "What is this processor? The SuperH processor is a Japanese design developed by Hitachi in the late 1990's. As a second generation hybrid RISC design it was easier for compilers to generate good code for than earlier RISC chips, and it recaptured much of the code density of earlier CISC designs by using fixed length 16 bit instructions (with 32 bit register size and address space), using microcoding to allow some instructions to perform multiple clock cycles of work. (Earlier pure risc designs used one instruction per clock cycle even when that served no purpose but to make the code bigger and exhaust the encoding space.) Hitachi developed 4 generations of SuperH. SH2 made it to the United states in the Sega Saturn game console, and SH4 powered the Sega Dreamcast. They were also widely used in areas outside the US cosumer market, such as the japanese automative industry. But during the height of SuperH's development, the 1997 asian economic crisis caused Hitachi to tighten its belt, eventually partnering with Mitsubishi to spin off its microprocessor division into a new company called "Renesas". This new company did not inherit the Hitachi engineers who had designed SuperH, and Renesas' own attempts at further development on SuperH didn't even interest enough customers for the result to go ito production. Eventually Renesas moved on to new designs it had developed entirely in-house, and SuperH receded in importance to them... until the patents expired."

kjs3 2y ago
The SH4 is a really interesting chip, with some embryonic vector instruction. There are also SH variants with a DSP bolted on.
mikepurvis 2y ago
Interesting point of history— the H8 processor is the MCU that powers the original Lego Mindstorms RCX. In high school I wrote some assembly language for it when making a robot that ran on BrickOS: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS
- kn100 2y ago
  a slightly different (but close enough) Hitachi CPU also powered the Cybiko - a wacky games console few have heard of. I tried writing a disassembler for that particular cpu a while back. Was an interesting platform and oh man the documentation at least to me was gorgeous: github.com/kn100/cybemu/

RajT88 2y ago

As an aside my recent trip to Japan, I hit up all the crazy gaming stores hoping to find an FM Towns or the even more rare FM Towns Marty. They looked at me like I was a three headed monkey.

mappu 2y ago
I looked around too - Mandarake only had popular consoles; Super Potato in Akihabara and Retro TV Game Revival in Osaka had MSX, but no FM Towns. The store clerk read my enquiry off Google Translate on my phone and gave me a one-word reply: いいえ. It probably takes local expertise to find one in someone's attic. Playing its Lupin III exclusive game might have to remain a MAME job.
- pezezin 2y ago
  If you are looking for retrocomputers in Akihabara, the place to visit is BEEP. It is the only shops that specializes in that kind of stuff.
Tiktaalik 2y ago
I did see some old PCs of that sort at Hard-off further afield. I don't recall where. May have been in the burbs around Osaka. In Tokyo the easily accessible source to have a peek at some computers like this is BEEP in Akihabara. Edit: Yep looking through my photos I saw an FM Towns Marty at a Hard Off in Kanazawa. ¥49500. Saw an actual FM Towns at a Hard off in Hachioji. More ¥77000 when you combine the monitor and computer. That last big Eco Town in Hachioji was quite the old PC source. Also had a PC 98 and boxed (!) X68000.
- RajT88 2y ago
  > ¥49500 At current exchange rate, that is a steal! Kanazawa is... Sadly not typically a place you go if you're on a brief visit of a couple weeks. When I was studying abroad in 2001, I saw an original FM Towns tower case basically in the junk pile. I wanted it even then for how distinctive it was, but had no clue what it was. What might have been!
2y ago

tantalor 2y ago

This would be much more comprehensible if the author would include some dates.

fnord77 2y ago

sadly, no pics. The FM Towns was kinda cool looking

nisten 2y ago

they got old

pyeri 2y ago

Anyone remembers Toshiba laptops? Their build quality was top-notch and they were quite durable at the price point they came. Then around 2012-14, they started disappearing from the market, what happened to them?

lifeformed 2y ago
They rebranded to Dynabook I think?
- pyeri 2y ago
  Just Googled and came to know they sold their stake in PC division to another Japanese company called Sharp in 2018, this Sharp then later rebranded as Dynabook. But it no longer has the same traction as original Toshiba, nor is it available on most online ecommerce stores.
  - rvba 2y ago
    Can someone with a background in marketing explain why so many companies drop their recognizable brand names and start using other names, which have lower market penetation? My theory is either mergers/spinoffs.. or someone in markering wants to get a bonus, so they kill the brand. Someone at blizzard wanted to rename battle.net to blizzard app for example
    - ghaff 2y ago
      There are a lot Of reasons, often not good ones, but it’s often the case that the existing brand doesn’t really represent what the company does any longer or is too narrow. Of course it may just be a marketing VP who wants a prestige project on their resume.
    - simne 2y ago
      Cause could be regulations, or some bigger brand strict rules. For example, anti-monopoly regulators looking very formal, when somebody appear to share more than 30% of market, then just turn on prohibitively high taxes. Other example, Nintendo limited number of games published from one brand, so big companies have created daughter companies who formally own some of IP.

Razengan 2y ago

In a YouTube video about the history of OS/2, I learned that ole Microsoft back in the 1990s before their mob tactics were curtailed, used to send suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers to chastise them for even offering users the mere option of buying PCs with OS/2 instead of Windows.. Could such practices have stifled the innovation and growth within the Japanese PC industry? They did have some takes of their own on the PC platform with that unique Japanese flavor, in series like the PC-8800/PC-98, FM Towns, etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-8800_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-8800_series https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns Who knows what more they could've done if Windows 95 hadn't smothered everything under the sun? Like the ill-deserved demise of the Commodore Amiga, this seems like a failure of politics than merit.

FMecha 2y ago
>In a YouTube video about the history of OS/2, I learned that ole Microsoft back in the 1990s before their mob tactics were curtailed, used to send suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers to chastise them for even offering users the mere option of buying PCs with OS/2 instead of Windows.. That, out of context, gives an impression-implication of Microsoft's Japanese operations having ties with the yakuza. And for PC-98 and FM Towns, versions of Windows were available for them (with FM Towns' uniqueness diminishing gradually as Fujitsu embraced DOS/V).

JSR_FDED 2y ago

I remember working in Taiwan in the late nineties and noticed that the PE2 editor for MSDOS was incredibly popular, because you could easily define macros that mapped to multi-character sequences, which combined with a BIOS that had character tables for simplified Chinese meant you could generate Chinese text without too much difficulty. To this day my vimrc has some of those PE2 macros :-)

amelius 2y ago

> The thing about DOS is that it’s a much thinner OS than what we think of in 2024. When you’re writing DOS software of any kind of complexity, you’re talking straight to the hardware, or to drivers that are specific to particular classes of hardware. How is that different from how we access our GPUs nowadays?

bitmasher9 2y ago
Today we access GPUs through standard APIs like DirectX, CUDA, OpenGL etc. In DOS there wasn’t these standards, and you had to write code for specific hardware.
- amelius 2y ago
  True, but our OS has no idea what processes run on which GPU, or how much GPU memory they use. Everything on the GPU happens behind the back of the OS.
  - TazeTSchnitzel 2y ago
    That's not true, the kernel driver knows what page mappings belong to particular processes, including GPU page mappings. Moreover, you have no choice but to talk to that kernel driver; you can't go behind its back and talk truly directly to the GPU, even if you bypass the userspace GPU driver, because this would allow circumventing memory protection. It is true, however, that modern GPU kernel drivers are relatively thin.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  This is why DOS games that supported 3DFX just talked directly to the GPU. They documented all the registers mapping for direct access. Didn't even need to install drivers. DOS was in its twilight years at that point, Nvidia/ATI didn't bother with DOS support so they just kept them behind OpenGL/DirectX.

DrNosferatu 2y ago

I guess Unicode happened?

DrNosferatu 2y ago

The MSX in Japan had a Japanese character set. Was this good enough for mainstream word processing needs? Really curious to know! PS: I mean letters, essays, etc - not DTP.

phonon 2y ago
https://www.msx.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_Word_Processors https://www.msx.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_Word_Processors

pnw 2y ago

Some of the Japanese PC platforms were sold in Australia. Shout-out to the Hitachi Peach, a curious 6809 machine reminiscent of an Apple II. My high school friends father purchased one (it was cheaper than an actual PC) and we spent many weekends coding on it but it was very difficult to find much info beyond the manual. IIRC it had Microsoft Basic but a proprietary OS. Parts of the manual were still in Japanese. It all seemed so exotic at the time.