7 ms·

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 impo

by 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)

ViktorRay 2y ago
Very interesting! Thanks for posting this!
ghaff 2y ago
Even in the larger commercial computer space, Japan always liked to sorta do their own thing. Aside from a couple other companies, they were always big Itanium backers for example. I was an analyst during that period and Japan was always something of an outlier. (Europe was to some degree as well. But less so.)
- bonzini 2y ago
  Regarding Itanium, that could be just by chance because Fujitsu is the main (or almost only) seller of supercomputers in Japan partnered with HP. Also interesting however is how they switched to it from SPARC and actually kept using SPARC longer than the west.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    NEC and Hitachi were involved as well. There was some sort of dynamic of collectively wanting something different from commodity x86.
tkgally 2y ago
Excellent summary. A few additional comments from personal memory: I have lived in Japan since 1983, and I started working as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator in 1986. I wanted to produce clean-looking text in English for my clients, so after a few months using a manual typewriter I took out a loan and bought a Macintosh with a dot-matrix printer. If I remember correctly, it cost six hundred thousand yen. The Mac could not handle Japanese; when I needed to write Japanese text, such as for notes to clients, I wrote by hand. I eventually bought a dedicated Japanese word processor for writing clean text in Japanese. Around 1992, I bought a modem and went online, first to a local foreign-run BBS and then, a couple of years later, the Internet. Many of the first friends I made online were Japanese-English translators like myself, and some of the most active discussion groups I took part in were about the Japanese language and translation. The display of Japanese characters in our online discussions was a problem for a long time. Even as more and more of the participants became able to type Japanese on their own computers, they were using a variety of OSs and character encodings, and the Japanese parts of their messages, when posted online, would be corrupted more often than not. When discussing a particular Japanese expression, we would have to romanize the Japanese and, sometimes, explain what kanji were used. Here’s are two examples from posts to a translators’ mailing list in 1998: > While this handbook uses "åòå≈ê´" for "robustness", the systems engineers I work with prefer "ÉçÉoÉXÉgê´" <robasutosei>. > Ruth, the kanji for taikou are tai (as in taishi - Crown Prince) and kou (as in kugurido - the radical is mon with gou inside (gou = au/awasersu). Does this help? The dictionary meaning obviously does not make sense here. This made it impractical to discuss longer texts or to have our discussions in both English and Japanese. It was a great relief when, around 2000 or so, the encoding issues were gradually resolved and we became able to write Japanese freely in our online discussions. (Addendum: I am still in touch with some of the people on that mailing list, including the Ruth mentioned above. In fact, last month I attended a party in Yokohama in honor of her and her husband’s 55th wedding anniversary. Several other friends I first met online in the mid-1990s were there, too.)

by bane 2y ago

ViktorRay 2y ago

Very interesting! Thanks for posting this!

ghaff 2y ago

Even in the larger commercial computer space, Japan always liked to sorta do their own thing. Aside from a couple other companies, they were always big Itanium backers for example. I was an analyst during that period and Japan was always something of an outlier. (Europe was to some degree as well. But less so.)

bonzini 2y ago
Regarding Itanium, that could be just by chance because Fujitsu is the main (or almost only) seller of supercomputers in Japan partnered with HP. Also interesting however is how they switched to it from SPARC and actually kept using SPARC longer than the west.
- ghaff 2y ago
  NEC and Hitachi were involved as well. There was some sort of dynamic of collectively wanting something different from commodity x86.

tkgally 2y ago

Excellent summary. A few additional comments from personal memory: I have lived in Japan since 1983, and I started working as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator in 1986. I wanted to produce clean-looking text in English for my clients, so after a few months using a manual typewriter I took out a loan and bought a Macintosh with a dot-matrix printer. If I remember correctly, it cost six hundred thousand yen. The Mac could not handle Japanese; when I needed to write Japanese text, such as for notes to clients, I wrote by hand. I eventually bought a dedicated Japanese word processor for writing clean text in Japanese. Around 1992, I bought a modem and went online, first to a local foreign-run BBS and then, a couple of years later, the Internet. Many of the first friends I made online were Japanese-English translators like myself, and some of the most active discussion groups I took part in were about the Japanese language and translation. The display of Japanese characters in our online discussions was a problem for a long time. Even as more and more of the participants became able to type Japanese on their own computers, they were using a variety of OSs and character encodings, and the Japanese parts of their messages, when posted online, would be corrupted more often than not. When discussing a particular Japanese expression, we would have to romanize the Japanese and, sometimes, explain what kanji were used. Here’s are two examples from posts to a translators’ mailing list in 1998: > While this handbook uses "åòå≈ê´" for "robustness", the systems engineers I work with prefer "ÉçÉoÉXÉgê´" <robasutosei>. > Ruth, the kanji for taikou are tai (as in taishi - Crown Prince) and kou (as in kugurido - the radical is mon with gou inside (gou = au/awasersu). Does this help? The dictionary meaning obviously does not make sense here. This made it impractical to discuss longer texts or to have our discussions in both English and Japanese. It was a great relief when, around 2000 or so, the encoding issues were gradually resolved and we became able to write Japanese freely in our online discussions. (Addendum: I am still in touch with some of the people on that mailing list, including the Ruth mentioned above. In fact, last month I attended a party in Yokohama in honor of her and her husband’s 55th wedding anniversary. Several other friends I first met online in the mid-1990s were there, too.)