History of personal computers in Japan

Abstract

We give a survey on the history of computers in Japan that have been produced over the last 50 years. Here, we focus on the topics of personal computers (PCs). We can see PCs produced in Japan have very unique features. They coevolved with some other related machines, e.g. word processing machines, game machines, etc. They also had several localised features such as capability of dealing with Japanese language. At the same time, developers of PCs struggled to find a good solution between localisation and globalisation. In the early stage of the history of PCs, their architectures were all different, and software had to be developed and tuned for each of them. Thus providing a common platform to all PCs on which every software can run was indispensable for globalisation. In this paper, how PCs in Japan have been evolved and how such problems were attacked are discussed based on the author's experiences of developing early PCs.

GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT

KEYWORDS:

• History of computer
• development of computer
• computer in Japan
• personal computer
• MSX computer

Acknowledgements

The author warmly thanks for the help from Kenichi Morita, Professor Emeritus of Hiroshima University.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

ORCID

Ryozo Yamashita http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2073-7862

Notes

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parametron

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galapagos_syndrome

3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII_Corporation

5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80_Model_100

6 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6d/Japanese_typewriter_SH-280.jpg

7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0208

8 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0201

9 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS

10 http://museum.ipsj.or.jp/en/computer/personal/0009.html

11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metacharacter

12 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0213

13 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Unix_Code

14 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

15 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AX_architecture

16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chips_and_Technologies

17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITRON_project; https://www.convergedigest.com/2017/11/tron-forum-transfers-iot-os-to-ieee.html

18 https://www.top500.org/