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We could dig a big further and ask why computer were able to handle alphabet characters before hiragana for instance. Or why no EU company came up with an OS t

We could dig a big further and ask why computer were able to handle alphabet characters before hiragana for instance. Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows. At the end of the day I think the capital and investment aspects, market protections and political situations account for way more than sheer cultural or technical aspects.

mhandley 2y ago
> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows. They sort of did. For a while Symbian had two thirds of the smartphone OS market. And the real winner in the global OS marketplace today is Linux (I'm including Android here, though you could debate that), which started out life as European. But I do agree about investment opportunities.
skissane 2y ago
> We could dig a big further and ask why computer were able to handle alphabet characters before hiragana for instance. JIS X 0201 was released in 1969 and widely adopted on mainframe systems in the 1970s. It supports a modified form of Katakana (“half-width”) as well as the Latin alphabet in a 7 or 8 bit encoding. 8-bit encodings supported both, for 7-bit you could switch between Katakana and Latin using control characters. So, by the 1970s you could already do Japanese language computing if you limited yourself to katakana and romaji. Kanji took longer because there are too many characters for a 7/8-bit code and their visual complexity required more advanced display hardware, but already in 1971 IBM was selling their “IBM Kanji System” which contained specialised software, printers and keypunches to support Kanji on IBM S/360 mainframes. In 1979 IBM added support for 3270 terminals (with additional Kanji circuitry) to enable Kanji in interactive as opposed to batch mode punched card computing. Early systems without kanji support generally used katakana rather than hiragana, because if writing everything in katakana looks weird to Japanese speakers, doing the same thing in hiragana looks even weirder. Also, the “blockier” shape of katakana makes it more legible than hiragana on low resolution displays. > Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows. In the 1990s, Oracle licensed RISC OS from Acorn in the UK, and sold it in the US as Oracle NCOS (Network Computer Operating System). But the whole “network computer” thing was never as successful as its backers had hoped.
dxuh 2y ago
Hiragana (or rather Katakana) alone could never be enough to allow businesses and government institutions to use computers for their daily tasks. These scripts are not just different ways of writing the same things, but rather certain classes of words or certain words in certain contexts tend to use certain scripts. I doubt a fairly conservative society like Japan's would have switched to Katakana for legal documents just to accomodate computers.
miki123211 2y ago
> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows. Because if you're making something in the US, you have immediate access to a market of 330m[1] people, and they all speak a single language, follow roughly similar laws and regulations, and have relatively similar needs (e.g. software made for schools in Arizona is pretty likely to work well for schools in Kansas, because things like the A-F grade system stay the same). This rich market gives you plenty of opportunities to grow quickly. Once you grow large enough, you have pretty easy access to other large and rich markets that also speak English, and then you can get into the hard stuff like internationalization. If you start out as an EU company, you only have access to the population of your own country, and you're not large enough to handle internationalization or the 30 slightly different systems of laws, regulations, agreements with retailers and different store chains etc. It's a lot harder for you to grow at first, because the potential pool of customers able to use your product is much smaller. You have markets like China and India, which are technically better, but at least historically, they used to be poor enough that the US was a much better option in practice. I don't think this is the only reason for US domination, but it's definitely one of the reasons. [edit] [1[] the population was different back then, but the difference in scale was similar
physicsguy 2y ago
Well, what is now the EU market wasn't fully integrated into the "single market" until 1993, well after Unix (from which MacOS is obviously derived) and Windows OS's were starting to be developed. As others have said, trying to target all those different countries and languages is not that straightforward, but it was significantly harder 30 years ago.

mhandley 2y ago

> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows. They sort of did. For a while Symbian had two thirds of the smartphone OS market. And the real winner in the global OS marketplace today is Linux (I'm including Android here, though you could debate that), which started out life as European. But I do agree about investment opportunities.

skissane 2y ago

> We could dig a big further and ask why computer were able to handle alphabet characters before hiragana for instance. JIS X 0201 was released in 1969 and widely adopted on mainframe systems in the 1970s. It supports a modified form of Katakana (“half-width”) as well as the Latin alphabet in a 7 or 8 bit encoding. 8-bit encodings supported both, for 7-bit you could switch between Katakana and Latin using control characters. So, by the 1970s you could already do Japanese language computing if you limited yourself to katakana and romaji. Kanji took longer because there are too many characters for a 7/8-bit code and their visual complexity required more advanced display hardware, but already in 1971 IBM was selling their “IBM Kanji System” which contained specialised software, printers and keypunches to support Kanji on IBM S/360 mainframes. In 1979 IBM added support for 3270 terminals (with additional Kanji circuitry) to enable Kanji in interactive as opposed to batch mode punched card computing. Early systems without kanji support generally used katakana rather than hiragana, because if writing everything in katakana looks weird to Japanese speakers, doing the same thing in hiragana looks even weirder. Also, the “blockier” shape of katakana makes it more legible than hiragana on low resolution displays. > Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows. In the 1990s, Oracle licensed RISC OS from Acorn in the UK, and sold it in the US as Oracle NCOS (Network Computer Operating System). But the whole “network computer” thing was never as successful as its backers had hoped.

dxuh 2y ago

Hiragana (or rather Katakana) alone could never be enough to allow businesses and government institutions to use computers for their daily tasks. These scripts are not just different ways of writing the same things, but rather certain classes of words or certain words in certain contexts tend to use certain scripts. I doubt a fairly conservative society like Japan's would have switched to Katakana for legal documents just to accomodate computers.

miki123211 2y ago

> Or why no EU company came up with an OS that could fight Mac OS or Windows. Because if you're making something in the US, you have immediate access to a market of 330m[1] people, and they all speak a single language, follow roughly similar laws and regulations, and have relatively similar needs (e.g. software made for schools in Arizona is pretty likely to work well for schools in Kansas, because things like the A-F grade system stay the same). This rich market gives you plenty of opportunities to grow quickly. Once you grow large enough, you have pretty easy access to other large and rich markets that also speak English, and then you can get into the hard stuff like internationalization. If you start out as an EU company, you only have access to the population of your own country, and you're not large enough to handle internationalization or the 30 slightly different systems of laws, regulations, agreements with retailers and different store chains etc. It's a lot harder for you to grow at first, because the potential pool of customers able to use your product is much smaller. You have markets like China and India, which are technically better, but at least historically, they used to be poor enough that the US was a much better option in practice. I don't think this is the only reason for US domination, but it's definitely one of the reasons. [edit] [1[] the population was different back then, but the difference in scale was similar

physicsguy 2y ago

Well, what is now the EU market wasn't fully integrated into the "single market" until 1993, well after Unix (from which MacOS is obviously derived) and Windows OS's were starting to be developed. As others have said, trying to target all those different countries and languages is not that straightforward, but it was significantly harder 30 years ago.