Japanese computers

[Gavin Thomas Nicol]

On Oct 29, 2005, at 9:08 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:

> The problem of display (using 1970's technology) is more thorny.   
> Kanji
> symbols are quite complex and detailed, requiring very good video  
> displays
> and character generation.  Printing  presents its own issues.   
> While the US
> and Europe was quite happy with 9-pin dot matrix printheads, the  
> Japanese
> of necessity introduced 18 and 22 wire printheads to deal with the  
> problem
> of Kanji character generation.  Daisy-wheel technology was clearly  
> not an
> alternative!

I've seen a Japanese typewriter... quite a beast!

FWIW. The early NEC PC9801 was very much like the IBM PC of the time,  
but with some strange omissions/changes in the BIOS (which, when  
disassembled had a marked similarity to the IBM PC BIOS), like  
routines for displaying characters. Instead they had a 16 bit VRAM  
that you wrote to directly... and you could do some really  
interesting things in that space, like doing simple character  
animations etc.

The one Japanese machine I'd love to get my hands on would be one of  
the 5th generation computing projects prolog machines... the Japanese  
response to Symbolics LISP machines (Symbolics ended up belonging to  
Shin Nitetsu or somesuch from memory). There was a purple one that  
NEC made (I think), about the size of Sun E250.