Why the Japanese PC Failed

Additional Notes:
7:01 Credit to the FlemishDog Collection for the wonderful and distinct commercial. Check out his collection here: archive.org/details/flemishdog
Links:
- The Asianometry Newsletter: www.asianometry.com
- Patreon: / asianometry
- Twitter: / asianometry

[@jaseaquino]

Weirdly enough, Epson still makes PCs but only sold in Japan. The whole world knows that they're a printer company.

[@markarca6360]

They also manufacture video projectors, as well. Also, there are other Japanese companies that are into PC business like Fujitsu, NEC, and Toshiba (Laptop division rebranded as Dynabook and Solid state storage [SSDs, flash drives, memory cards] division rebranded as Kioxia).

[@a11u45]

​@@markarca6360yeah, my first laptop was a Toshiba laptop back in 2012.

[@chuckygobyebye]

Mate, Yahoo! is still a big company there.

[@studytime2570]

and i thought epson is a Korean company😅

[@beeman4266]

Epson printers are legitimately one of the worst pieces of technology I've ever used. It's incredible how they're even allowed to sell such a terrible product.

[@z-e-r-o-]

Wow… 😮 As a japanese born in 1986 who’s been using computers as an essential tool, this video hit me. Your research on overseas topics like this is incredibly deep and convincing, as always! 👍 いつもながら、すごいよ、春日大社のシカさん！ 🦌^^

[@DioBrando-qr6ye]

What about Sharp? I'm confused, I thought Sharp was a big player in Japan but in this video they didn't even mention it (although, they do show a picture of an X68000 at minute 16:50), why is that?

[@mobilemarshall]

@@DioBrando-qr6ye Sharp was/is a computer tech company now? Or when are you talking about? Sharp is a mass production company which happens to make a few electronics related devices because they make home appliances etc. TV's VCR's and calculators are not personal computing. They were never a competitor in the PC tech space so I have no clue what you're on about.

[@prufrockrenegade]

​​​@@mobilemarshalllook up the X68000. It's kind of a legend among gaming nerds because it was pretty much considered to be the absolute best consumer hardware for running video games at the time. Apparently Capcom used these machines to develop their massive arcade hits in that era, and unsurprisingly, the versions of those games that Capcom released for the platform performed pretty much on par with the multi-thousand dollar arcade cabinets they were based on. That's something mainstream consoles of the time like the Mega Drive/Genesis or NEC's own PC Engine/TurboGrafx could never come close to achieving in most cases

[@prufrockrenegade]

​@@DioBrando-qr6yeI'm also surprised the MSX standard was never mentioned

[@DioBrando-qr6ye]

@@mobilemarshall The Sharp X68000 is a legendary Japanese computer, very advanced in the audiovisual department for its time (if you want to compare to a western computer you could say it was the Japanese Amiga). It was used by Capcom to develop their major arcade hits, and in fact many games such as Ghouls N Ghosts and Street Fighter 2 are arcade perfect on the X68000.

[@Waccoon]

The hard lesson: ALWAYS focus on software. Hardware is simply a means to an end, and he who controls the software controls the platform. That's why Microsoft was always the real winner in the end.

[@apollosungod2819]

At the same time Microsoft has stagnated most of the early competitors who could have created an alternative O.S. which could have led to an alternative platform that might have exposed the flaws and problems with Windows and thus held back most advancement of O.S. technology since most software developers decided to rely on Microsoft or use Apple Mac O.S. while Linux mostly remained a novelty until Android O.S. came in much later.

[@Funktastico]

What about the Windows Mobile on Nokia stunt ?

[@mercster]

That's pretty easy to say nowadays (or even 20 years ago) when the home platform has basically been settled. It was not so in the early 80s.

[@hermangouw]

Even better control BOTH software and hardware like Apple does. That is why Apple iPhones and other devices will be around for a long long time.

[@hermangouw]

@@Funktastico... Microsoft was too late in entering the smartphone business. I personally love Windows Mobile (as I come from a Windows background) but the lack of apps was very worrying. That was why I decided to buy iPhone 4 as my first smartphone in 2011.

[@aremmes]

FWIW, the V in DOS/V stands for "video", since DOS/V uses graphics display modes to show text instead of PC-native text modes which have no glyphs for CJK character sets. Thus, "doss-vee", not "doss-five".

[@jorcyd]

According to Wikipedia the V actually stood for "VGA" , since in order to render Kanji properly it needed to run on a VGA mode rather than on plain old character based CGA mode... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS%2FV?wprov=sfla1

[@PainterVierax]

@@jorcyd that's what OP said

[@forbiddenera]

..and the first word of the VGA acronym is......

[@dankanemitsu3336]

As a native Japanese speaker, I can confirm that the V in DOS/V is Vee not Five. The word is prononced ドスブィ do-su-vu-i, or DOS - Vee. Vui is how we say V in Japanese. Since Japanese and English have different phonemes, the pronunciation for the English alphabet and words can be sightly different, e.g. VGA = ビィー・ジー・エー Vee Gee Ehe. Also, traditionally, we did not have a separate way of to pronounce B and V in some words, hence both "van" and "ban" is pronounced バン ban in Japanese.

[@katrinabryce]

@@jorcyd and VGA is Video Graphics Array

[@dosgos]

A few years later, Toshiba laptops took Europe by storm. Toshiba had some great laptops.

[@ChickensAndGardening]

So did Sony.

[@alastairward2774]

​@@ChickensAndGardeningthe Sony Vaio range looked so splendid.

[@bennri]

I had a Toshiba t1200 from 1987. Brought it to Japan to use at work, and was forced to leave it at home because it looked arrogant for me to have my own laptop while everybody else was sharing.

[@aGGeRReS]

It's such a shame that Panasonic does not sell the same laptops elsewhere as they sell in Japan.

[@ZiggyTheHamster]

FYI: DOS/V means "Disk Operating System/VGA", not DOS 5.

[@jessihawkins9116]

no

[@ZiggyTheHamster]

@@jessihawkins9116 the first release of DOS/V was 4.05, and the last release was based on DOS 6 and accordingly was 6.2. It may be the “V” was a backronym to “VGA” since it supports other newer graphics adapters (so maybe it was meant to be “video”), but it definitely is not DOS 5

[@jessihawkins9116]

@@ZiggyTheHamster no

[@Nope_handlesaretrash]

ZUN cranked out five games for the PC-98, he only stopped and moved onto Windows because everyone else in Japan did too in that timeframe.

[@richardwang9315]

That's correct

[@Sypaka]

The 2HU guy?

[@rayoflight62]

I remember the invasion of Japanese computers in 1981. They were priced wrong, though. One Sharp PC cost as thirty ZX81. I can say, they were more expensive than the original IBM PC with the 8088 - and still they hadn't an hard drive, and had its own flavor of BASIC. But the cause of failure was that the Japanese sold you the PC, with no software assistance. Offices and companies were looking to automate accountancy or some manufacturing process, and there were no offers of software writing, or interface cards from the Japanese companies. They pretended to sell PC like they were high-end HiFi equipment - which they were selling tons of at the time. Thanks for the video. Regards, Anthony

[@tomschmidt381]

Thanks for the history lesson. I worked for NEC Technology in the US designing WinTel PCs from 1990-94. It was a good run for a while. We had an advantage because we were able to partner with the NEC monitor division back in the CRT days. But alas never gained significant market share and by the mid 1990s the handwriting was on the wall.

[@stevebabiak6997]

I worked in the CRT industry at that time, the NEC CRTs (the display tube, not necessarily the monitor) we’re inferior to the competition. Hitachi, Mitsubishi, Sony, even Toshiba had better CRTs from my recollection.

[@tng2057]

It is super ironic. Back in the 80s the dominant IT question was ‘Who will build the super computer, US or Japan?’.

[@DailyLifeSolution]

US seems a country but in matters of technology, US represents western block. Japan was fighting to a block of countries with talent pool and population far greater than itself. So, isolation benefitted it until US succeeded in breaking it.

[@ChickensAndGardening]

The U.S. was always stronger in software, and in the long run, as hardware commoditized, software became the most important thing, which is why Microsoft won. And then, the Internet became the most important thing, giving Google and a few other companies an entry. Microsoft is still a trillion dollar company but they totally lost the mobile market, and amazingly so did Japan, despite its great engineers.

[@dickiesdocos]

@@ChickensAndGardening Windows Phone’s market share peaked at just over 3 per cent in 2013. This means they weren't even close to winning the mobile phone market.

[@ChickensAndGardening]

@@dickiesdocos Microsoft's problems had to do with its desktop mentality, starting with Bill Gates, who failed to see the Internet's potential. A Microsoft executive who tried to move the company's products toward more online/Internet orientation got pushed out in the '90s, and then they tried to entice him back when they saw he was right, but he said "no, thanks!". MS still has a pretty firm grip on the desktop market, though Apple has eaten into their market share massively with their excellent Mac's and laptops.

[@mevideym]

​@@ChickensAndGardeningI don't know if I can agree. Chip design is still pretty centralized, e.g. CPUs and graphics cards, so is production. Whereas for software one often has many open source/globally developed options

[@dndboy13]

man, this era of computer development is fascinating to me, and i really appreciate you diggin thru whatever documentation you were able to find to get a perspective outside of the relatively small window i usually come across (that being the UK and US and their distinct computer markets in the early 80s).

[@sefarkas0]

in 1981 I was on a business trip to Tokyo. While shoehorned into my Japanese business hotel room I surfed Japanese television. I was blow away with two channels devoted to basic programming in prime time. While at home (US) there was none. we were running CP/M on homemade hardware trading programing tips in dark back alleys. Wow did things change. Up until the mid 90's if you bought computer peripherals for Ham Radio made in Japan it was totally incompatible at a hardware level as the US serial ports were RS-232, japanese peripherals were TTL made for Japanese computers.

[@bennri]

That incompatibility was by design, and a major motivation for super 301.

[@robinsattahip2376]

I went to an "English Bar" in Tokyo where English speakers drink for free just to engage in conversations with Japanese who come there to practice their language skills. Spent the evening talking to a female helicopter mechanic, she could have had me for a lifetime if she had wanted though I did not say anything. Cost her one Coke Zero.

[@mattmichael2441]

That's crazy.

[@tachikaze222]

I was living in Tokyo in the 1990s and saw this first-hand. In 1992 Fujitsu FM-Towns, Sharp X-68000 were interesting alternatives to PC-9801 and DOS/V. I had carried a Mac IIcx + 13" monitor in my luggage so was 5-10 years ahead of Wintel while I was there. Color Macs were pretty expensive in the early 1990s but got more affordable with the LC series, especially the LC III in '93-94. But Windows 95 came through and everything soon went with that, making the Mac's advantage over 16-bit OSs irrelevant.

[@oscodains]

What’s the experience of traveling with a ~40lb CRT like?

[@tachikaze222]

@@oscodains I was 25 so could carry the world (cue "Like a Rock")

[@bennri]

I was at Panasonic and definitely remember Windows 3.1 was the first Windows OS we took seriously. And the internet was not taken seriously until 1995 when that was the best way to find out if your relatives in Kobe were dead or alive.

[@tachikaze222]

@@missplainjane3905 Sharp X-68000 had the most potential but (like the Amiga) didn't have the APIs for developers to create good software with.

[@tdb7992]

My goodness, that advert from 1983 with the shirtless guy is certainly something! Thanks for making another great video. I hadn't thought of NEC in years.

[@moses1202]

There is an animation called “16-bit sensation” which the story is set in 1990’s Japan. It shows us the fall of PC98 and the rise of Windows system. While the animated version differs from the original comic but the background is quite the same. For those who are interested in Japan’s PC market in 1990s, I recommend “16-bit sensation“.

[@youcantata]

Reason NEC PC-98 failed: No custom chipset for PC-98. During the critical 1985-1990 period, IBM-AT compatible clones get cheaper and cheaper by year due to so-called integrated PC "chipet" solution. The PC "Chipsets" from companies like Chips and Technology (NEAT chipset for PC-AT clone) reduced cost of PC clones like COMPAQ greatly. Chip count and cost for PC-AT compatible motherboard and graphic card were reduced drastically during that period. But PC-98 could not enjoy such cost reduction from such integrated chipset solution due to its incompatibility with PC-AT hardware. So PC-98 hardware was way more expensive to make than PC clones with DOS/V.

[@klam77]

imagine! the tail (low tech chipset; only finite state digital logic) wagging the dog (CPU: much higher tech, much more value added). US gets away with murder like hiroshi8ma

[@Longlius]

​@@klam77 By the time the PC-98 platform died, it wasn't the US mass-producing cheap integrated digital logic for motherboards but Taiwan.

[@cv990a4]

I'd say that was a contributing reason. The real reason was US-standard computers got powerful enough that US-standard software could include support for Japanese language as an option, and then the greater weight of the US-standard ecosystem crushed the Japanese ecosystem. By that point US-standard computers were well on their way to being commodity-priced. But it was US software that got powerful enough (because the underlying computers were powerful enough) that they could incorporate Japanese.

[@theotherohlourdespadua1131]

​@@klam77Gunpei Yokoi from Nintendo said it best: high-tech isn't always the best. He espoused the design philosophy of "Lateral Thinking with Withered (Matured) Technology" which states that old tech can be made competitive against new tech by expanding the capabilities of the old tech in new ways. Look at the Gameboy and compare it to the Sega Game Gear: the latter is more high tech because it can has a color screen and more powerful microprocessor but it consumes batteries faster than the the weaker (Z80 clone) LCD Gameboy with no backlight...

[@klam77]

@@Longliustrue. but taiwan was only enshrining the wintel game.

[@Longlius]

I would point out that the TK-80 was not the first kit to have this form factor. That would have been MOS Technology's KIM-1 which was the direct inspiration for the TK-80's design.

[@vibrolax]

My US company bought an NEC APC for evaluation in ~1982, before it was clear that IBM PC compatibility would be an essential characteristic. I got to take it home, where I learned how to program the graphics, PIC, and UART. I wrote a bunch of terminal emulators for all the DEC, DG, Pr1me, Tektronix, SEL, and other miscellaneous minis we used. Loved that thing, especially the 8" 1.2 mb floppy disks.

[@chazmaru9583]

Excellent recap, thanks! (DOS/V is pronounced "Doss Vee")

[@capability-snob]

So much promise! The Sharp x68000 is a good example of a direction we might have gone, but economics is tough, and this shows how challenging the meteoric rise of worse-is-better in the 90s computer market would have been to predict.

[@PropaneWP]

I still consider the X68000 the holy grail of computers from that time period. Unfortunately, it was probably too expensive for the home market.

[@aublak7492]

A video on the Sharp x68000 would be great.

[@tachikaze222]

Too bad the 68K makers couldn't have banded together; Sharp's ID, Amiga video, Atari audio, Apple's Macintosh APIs, NeXT for the OS itself : )

[@DioBrando-qr6ye]

​@@PropaneWPthey should have made a cost reduced version like Commodore did with the Amiga 500.

[@shuichirohirakawa3945]

Thank you for the nice video. Good old days. We used to call PC-DOS that handles Japanese characters on IBM compatibles "DOS vee" (or more precisely "DOS-bui" in Japanese pronunciation of "V"), but not "DOS five". This new version of DOS opened up Japanese closed PC market to the world and liberated us from the dictatorship of NEC.

[@MithunOnTheNet]

It'll be nice to know more about Toshiba's journey from being the first to introduce the laptop to pretty much exiting the laptop business a few years back.

[@ChickensAndGardening]

One problem for Toshiba was the lawsuit back in the '90s over some obscure bug in the chipset, having to do with the hard drive as I recall. Predatory lawyers got a hold of the issue and created a huge class action lawsuit even though apparently almost no one had any harm from the bug, and staged the trial in west Texas with a jury of cowboys who always vote against the big evil corporation. Ultimately Toshiba agreed to settle for billions of dollars, to everyone's amazement, and this probably was the first death blow. I've always felt that was an evil judge and evil lawyers and the main reason they got away with basically a massive shakedown was that many Americans held a residual hostility toward Japan over WW2 and also the decimation of the U.S. car market by superior Japanese vehicles.

[@LatitudeSky]

Bit-inn lived on as kind of a joke. The Mospeada anime c.1983 had a video called "Live at PIT-Inn" referencing both the Bit Inn and a pit (hole in the ground), part of the anime storyline. It's a pun of sorts. Well, it is if you know about the Bit-inn.

[@lexpee]

Not a word about the very popular MSX computer at that time in Japan that was sold there until 1992. The games from Konami came first out on the MSX computer and later for other computers and games consoles.

[@POVwithRC]

Now I want to go play with PC98

[@richardwang9315]

Nice! 😄👍

[@richshealer3755]

I worked for a US based calculator sales and service center for Canon USA. Canon had a lot of desktop programmable calculators in the 70's. Wire wrap, punch cards, magetic strip cards and floppy disks as they bridged between calculators and computers. The typewriter division even made dedicated word processors. Canon was also responsible for Jeff Raskin's Canon Cat his second Macintosh. Canon was also heavily invested in Steve Job's Next. I find it amazing how many pies Canon has had their hands in.

[@captainthunderbolt7541]

Unlike the warring states, none of Japan's PC platforms were able to consolidate power. There were some absolutely legendary platforms though. PC88, Sharp X68000, and MSX had some fantastic gaming capabilities!

[@dewiz9596]

The significance of bitmapped screens vs character-generater based screens CANNOT be over-emphasized. And DOS 5 was the epitome of IBM’s OS. 6.22 tweaked it. But DOS 5. . . Oh, my.

[@stevetodd7383]

The IBM PC was actually little better than existing PCs of the time. In theory the 8088 was a faster chip, but in practice it didn’t fare well against 2MHz 6502 or 4MHz Z80 machines. The reasons for it taking off were the IBM name and the well documented hardware and software platforms (which allowed 3rd parties to develop custom hardware and software). The result was a circle where people bought it (or clones) because of the available hardware and software, which caused more manufacturers to develop for it, which caused more users to buy it etc. Intel were lucky in being there at the right time. Technically the 8088 was second rate, and if IBM hadn’t picked it then it would have vanished into obscurity.

[@ChickensAndGardening]

The engineers designing the first IBM PC looked at the Motorola 68000 which had a 32-bit architecture, vs. the 8/16 bit 8088, but concluded Motorola couldn't produce processors in sufficient quantity.

[@UmiharaKawaseTube]

Yeah, I thought this too - the IBM PC's success seemed to be more due to the IBM name than the PC hardware. I've spent much of my life chatting with IT nerds, and it's striking that almost nobody has fond memories of the 80s IBM PC. They were functional machines, reasonably powerful, but they didn't seem to generate user enthusiasm like Apple, Commodore etc did. I suspect this must be at least partly due to the horribly garish video modes, pre-VGA. I was playing around with a MiSTer recently, specifically the IBM core, and god, EGA/CGA are just nausea-inducing.

[@ChickensAndGardening]

@@UmiharaKawaseTube Apple was a counter-culture hippy thing, Commodore/Atari was a toy, and IBM PC was for business people. (I started out with a VIC-20 and then a C64 and they were great machines back in the day :)

[@tommylakindasorta3068]

I love messing around with NEC PC 88/98, FM Towns and Sharp X68000 emulators. To me this was a magical time in the development of home computers and PC gaming. So many great software houses came and went, while a few have withstood the test of time, such as Falcom. Thank you for the fascinating history lesson.

[@UnbornApple]

I have read that the “V” in DOS/V stands for VGA, not 5.

[@UnbornApple]

Also there was a PC-98 port of Windows 95.

[@es95950]

Excellent video, as always. Learned many details I was not aware of as I always do with your content. Looking forward to more.

[@retro-rock3067]

I’m very interested in many Japanese PCs because they’re really fun to look at while messing around and playing with them. Plus my favorite ones are MSX, Sharp X1, Nec Pc-8801, Fujitsu Micro-7, Sord M5, Hitachi S1, Sony Smc-777 and many others as well

[@tankload1337]

Thanks for this video, as a current employee of NEC this has been educational

[@dewiz9596]

“At the time”.. . I was certainly aware of Japan’s stress on bitmapped rather than character-based displays. In the end, I think this was to everyone’s advantage. I had my own fun at the time decoding Xerox 9700 bitmapped fonts and manipulating them. . . Slanting, embolding, rotating, etc. . .

[@archlich4489]

Nothing beats a good font!

[@techdistractions]

The NEC V20 and V30 chips sold well here in Australia. They were a drop in replacement for 8088/8086 and were cheap. Just buy one, rip out the old chip and put in the nec one - everything runs faster :-) It helped extend the sales life of the xt One of our Adelaide-based manufacturer “Micro Byte” designed and built its own computer using the v30 as a differentiator from other ibm-pc clones.

[@ppokorny99]

I had a V20 in my machine for exactly this reason

[@hiro_ken]

Great video! I owned a Sharp X1 and then an EPSON clone, but every friend had different model, so I had much fun porting games in BASIC or Assembly for a model to another as a teenager. By the way, we in Japan at the time used to read DOS/V as Dosu bui not Dosu 5 :)

[@harryragland7840]

I have two of the HP palmtop PCs and these run NEC V20s. I also had an Epson desktop at work in the mid 80s and it ran an NEC V30.

[@matthewmeldrum2890]

I've always wanted to learn the history behind NEC and the legendary pc98. Thanks so much for this one, Asianometry!

[@paulstubbs7678]

I had an NEC APC3 for a while, a really nice machine, it's colour graphics left the PC in the dust at the time. Strangely it used a stock Intel 8086 processor, I popped in an NEC V30 for a bit of extra performance, seemed strange that they didn't use their own chips, as it had zero comparability issues. This machine was a MS-DOS machine, as opposed to an IBM clone, so it didn't run most IBM software - not an issue for me at the time, however near the end of it's life that started to be an issue. NEC eventually brought out the 'SLE' card, or 'Software Library Expander', that was an IBM PC 'coprocessor' I mainly wrote my own software, usually with Turbo Pascal, often with an amateur/ham radio flair - RTTY, radio fax etc. I never could understood why the IBM PC came out with so low-res graphics at the time. I've seen several early-ish NASA photo's that show them using NEC APC's, the predecessor to the APC3, so obviously NASA saw them as the superior choice. As a side, a work colleague asked me if I'd like some software for it, of course I said yes. The next day he came in with a box of floppies containing Autocad among others, he walked into the local NEC dealers, grabbed a box of blank disks of the shelf, then proceeded to back-up the hard drive of the shops demo machine, then left after paying the price of a box of blank disks.... That bloke had 'balls', I'd never get away with such a stunt.

[@seraphinax6449]

The NEC APC-3 is basically a PC-98 adapted for the Western market, though they decided to simply make IBM clones right after that.

[@paulstubbs7678]

@@seraphinax6449 This video was the first time I ever heard about the origins of the APC line. Probably the nicest machine to use & program I've ever had, The supplied manuals had all the DOS & ROM calls listed, to allow me to write high-res graphics code etc.

[@rayoflight62]

We had a brief interlude of a software which acted similarly to the DOS V operating system. In 1993, WordPerfect 6.0 was released, building on the success of the 5.1 version. WordPerfect 6.0 easily switched from text-mode to a graphical mode, like the DOS/V did. In this mode, WordPerfect 6.0 displayed all the fonts, bold, italic fonts graphically. But it was slooow...

[@paulturner5769]

I remember writing a Z80 Assembler/Disassembler in BASIC on the Sharp MZ80K, back in England in the 80's. Were Sharp not big enough to mention in Japan?

[@midimoog]

In 1998, Microsoft launched Windows 98 and the PC98 initiative. Coincidentally, on the same year, NEC phased out of their PC-98 platform and moved onto Windows 98 and the PC98 compatible PC. This was confusing to the entry level consumer; and was seen as secret retreat from the battlefield by experienced users, particularly NEC user groups. In 1998 Sony made a big hit with their VAIO series which eventually overtook NEC in the consumer PC arena.

[@billpostscratcher2025]

I do so enjoy the history I did not know I wanted to know found on this channel. Bravo, always!

[@mattbland2380]

As I understand it Mac OS supported Japanese quite early on and they had a cult following in Japan, especially for laptops with some Japan only models being very collectable today. Because the system was a bitmap driven display from day one it had a big advantage over DOS. They were much more expensive than the PC machines.

[@tachikaze222]

I was in Japan in the 90s and was SO tempted to get a Powerbook 550c but it would have taken most of my summer bonus and the 7500 I had gotten earlier that year was going great.

[@berndkemmereit8252]

I love your videos, well reserached and they are about topics, I never thought about, but I'm interested in.

[@newwavex8665]

Man it would be so rad to program on one of these early models. The aesthetic design is so much better than anything modern.

[@cogoid]

3:33 Even early on, there were also some very good Japanese books explaining everything about TK-80 in the most simple way imaginable. One book, (which was shorter than 200 pages!) explained how to do basic soldering, functions and parameters of basic electronic components, which kits to buy, all about binary arithmetic, microprocessor architecture and command set, simple input output devices, and how to write simple programs in assembly language -- lots of amazingly useful information presented very, very economically. Quite a marvel -- unfortunately no English version exists, though Apple II manual was similarly awesome.

[@dosgos]

What was the name of that book?

[@cogoid]

@@dosgos 3日でわかるマイコン 買う・作る・使う by 森末、吉川

[@AiOinc1]

One of these days I'd love to hear a long format video like this on the microwinchester hard disk market of the 1980s. Wild west of design right there and it was all just about over by 1994. All spurred on by one drive: The Seagate ST-506.

[@michaelwessel4953]

This is such a great channel, I always learn a lot from watching your videos - THANK YOU!

[@Andronicus2007]

I think all the non Windows/Apple computers were swept awayby the mid 90s - in the USA Commodore and Atari were dead by the early 90s. In the U.K Sinclair, BBC Micro etc also died out around the same time. In Australia, we had a local computer that was successful in the 80s- the Microbee. Also dead by the 90s!

[@marcin_bruczkowski]

As a foreigner who has lived and worked in IT in Japan from 1985 to 1995 I thoroughly enjoyed your coverage of those pioneer and hectic days... Good job, sir :)

[@missplainjane3905]

How was it

[@marcin_bruczkowski]

@@missplainjane3905 Quite hectic :) But I got to meet some interesting people like Phil Katz, Alex Pajitnov, or young Bill Gates, who has visited our Tokyo PC Club on a few occasions to promote early Microsoft products in Japan, and joined us for pizza and beer in Omotesando afterwards. Not that anyone other than PC nerds knew who he was back then :)

[@JohnnieWalkerGreen]

My first computer was "Ai Business Computer 20" (ABC-20), Z80, 64KB, running DOSKET operation system.

[@MyNamesNotLars1]

Been waiting for this one out of all your "why X pc failed" videos. I love NEC games, I'm happy to hear you do a vidoc on them.

[@YanestraAgain]

Question: Why was the famed MSX computer no trace of a success at its time? Maybe rather a game console, but surely a promising multi-company project.

[@Longlius]

MSX was firmly 8-bit only and was standardized in 1983. Two years later, the first 16-bit consumer machines with full graphical operating systems and multitasking started hitting the market and though they were expensive, they would become the dominant mode of home computing by the end of the decade. The decline of MSX was more a side-effect of the decline of 8-bit computing generally rather than anything specifically wrong with the MSX standard.

[@PropaneWP]

MSX was relatively successful. It had popularity outside of Japan. I can't think of any other Japanese home computer system that achieved the same. I guess it's not mentioned in this video because it focuses on 'business machines' and not 'home machines'. To be honest, I think machines like the MSX and X68000 are the most interesting, because Japan could provide the best hardware solutions for 'home machines' at the time.

[@herberttlbd]

I was hoping to hear something about MSX here. Some claim MSX global sales were second to Commodore in the 8-bit market.

[@poofygoof]

It seems like a 16-bit successor to MSX(2) was technically feasible, but with NEC having such a dominance with PC-98, I wonder if a critical mass couldn't be reached. An MSX3 standard with an NEC V20 CPU seems like it could have carried a lot of software compatibility to both MSX and PC.

[@Longlius]

​@@poofygoof Well also, the MSX was basically a Microsoft standard and Microsoft already had a standard in mind for 16-bit computing - DOS (and later early Windows) running on an x86 compatible system.

[@tapewolf]

The NEC V-series seemed to do okay in the embedded market. Psion used the V30 in their Workabout mobile devices until the 2000s when they switched to CE. The Korg M1 synthesizers used a V50 as the main processor, and apparently some of the Akai S-series samplers did too.

[@idahofur]

I think it did better than most. According to wiki lasted until 2003. (another place said hardware was 2000) I remember reading about one last push on a final release from a mfg. Reminds me of when Radio Shack released the final TRS-80 Model 4d. If you look around. They talk about that being a final push too. If you really want to be smart about it. Macintosh just about failed too.

[@apollosungod2819]

The Japanese hardware engineers were designing custom PC architectures but they were still reliant on Microsoft O.S. compatability or even the custom DOS variants which were based on Microsoft DOS instead of developing a custom proprietary O.S. in Japan when they had the very talented programmers who could do this at a time when they could have secured financial security for it.

[@napoleonfeanor]

Despite not having native scrolling in 88/98, they had a lot of video games. They and the MSX microcomputers had many video game series premiered.

[@jjadragna]

As usual this is a very documented and precise story that you are counting us ! Maybe it would have been fair, to mention that the Japanese PC industry still lives through brands like VAIO or Panasonic Toughbook. And the vast adoption of MSX standard for 8 bit home computers in the 80’s

[@ChickensAndGardening]

Also the Hitachi robots and other Japanese tech that are used to build PC's and other devices (including Tesla cars).

[@dealman3312]

Great video. I remember deploying NEC 6030/6060's in the early 2000s when we were still using corporate mainframe terminals. The good old days.

[@ianstobie]

Japan had two international hits in the early 1980s, the Epson HX-20 and a bit later in 1983 the Tandy Model 100 (actually made by Kyocera). Both were astonishingly well made by the standards of computers of the time, and had a mature consumer product feel like a camera or calculator. They were genuinely portable long-life battery-powered computers in an A4 format, and allowed groundbreaking uses in specific portable niches, but ultimately proved a bit of a dead end as more general-purpose computers took over. Both had great keyboards but were limited in the display department. The Epson had a four line by 20 character monochrome LCD display, while the Tandy/Kyocera upped this considerably to eight lines by 40 characters - enough for realistic text editing. The Epson HX-20 had a small dot-matrix printer built in.

[@thisnicklldo]

Good machine, the HX-20. I worked for a distributor at that time, and we sold a lot. It had that 'just works' flavour about it. Very popular for travelling sales of various types, take your pricebook with you on the machine, print the invoices in front of the customer, do some configuration of whatever you were selling.

[@909crime]

I have been thinking about this topic all week!

[@JoeHamelin]

IIRC I once used a Sanyo "PC compatible" from back in those days, also an all-in-one Sanyo CP/M machine.

[@cejannuzi]

BTW, DOS/V stands for "Disk Operating System/VGA" (not "version 5"; DOS/V came out at approximately the same time as DOS 5).

[@robinsattahip2376]

Finding the drivers for Japanese PCs can be a nightmare and often they are cut off and unavailable through the manufacturer after just 5 years.

[@mattbland2380]

Sony Vaio completely destroyed their reputation over drivers. Upgrading an expensive laptop from Win2000 to XP meant zero support from them on a 3 month old machine. Same from XP to Windows Vista, Win7, etc. Friends who bought Vaio’s moved to Mac shortly after.

[@robinsattahip2376]

Sony has since sold Vaio and you almost never hear about them anymore. Maybe they are still common in Japan. @@mattbland2380

[@yamamoto65536]

Original NEC PC-9801 runs strategy game Nobunaga no Yabou of first released version, which was huge success and it served to increase user base. People not always install Ichitaro but most people uses ATOK of Justsystems as a FEP (Japanese IME) As a development environment, Boland C compiler was very popular instead of NEC genuine C compiler, IIRC Boland sells it for 50K yen while NEC sells it for 98K.

[@liowyew]

At that time, one could go to Japan town and found all kind of PC components. Shops handed all kind of motherboards on racks. I knew they had a laptop that had a printer built-in.

[@katrinabryce]

Canon sold such a laptop/printer combo in Europe.

[@feltongailey8987]

I have a NEC stereo receiver from 1989. That thing is a TANK! The build quality is phenomenal. It weighs darn near 30 pounds and is, truth be known, overengineered. NEC is like the company hardly anyone remembers.

[@ChrisMcDonough]

I'd love to hear about MSX too!

[@909crime]

Same!

[@michaelhoffmann2891]

Seiko Epson as Brutus to NEC's Julius Caesar is some brilliance right there! "Et tu, Seikus Epsonus?"

[@richardwang9315]

lolololol 😂🤣🤣🤣

[@klauszinser]

I had a Sharp MZ-700 in Germany. Z80 Microprocessor. It must have been in 1984. Very limited. Luckily - being a student with limited money - I got a Sinclair QL around 1987. Still an island. But it had Psion Software for Text Processing, Spreadsheet etc. Nearly all the student work was done on this until 1991. Siemens (Nixdorf downturn must have started) had a computer plant in Augsburg from 1986. Later it was Siemens-Nixdorf and from 1999 Fujitsu-Siemens.

[@nakayle]

Well researched and well presented.

[@jamesocker5235]

What was the real story behind vector graphics pc. We had one in the Navy for parts ordering on the USS Eisenhower. Not sure why our electronics group had it

[@antoller3541]

It was even more depressing - to hear Fujitsu employees in the late 80s bemoan that PCs in Japan were garbage, because they would not run foreign blood. In spite of the fact that Hitachi and Fujitsu (Amdahl) were successful in the PCM market in the seventies, because they ran “North American” software. In the US market NEC made good displays and Toshiba laptops (Clamshell) made a good run at it. That and the PCMs were it. Japan’s go at next gen 4GLs was hysterical. Tragic.

[@justicegear85]

Another conclusion: "The Japanese Software market side didn't flourish because the rest of the world besides Japan doesn't speak or read Japanese as commonly."

[@ArneChristianRosenfeldt]

Thanks for the games. Why would Japan be at the front of internal software? Where does Unicode come from? 8 bit can only support half of Europe.

[@StopItRyan]

I actually use an NEC Multi-Speed (circa 1988) laptop semi-commonly as a notepad at work. I like that it doesn't have internet access so I'm not tempted to mess around when I should be working.

[@scene2much]

I worked at Fujitsu America on their Fujitsu Micro-16 PC, and a 32bit design based on Intel 80386. The bane of our existence was Fujitsu's PHOBIA of using IBM PC Compatible BIOS. Going it alone with a Proprietary BIOS made it incompatible with most IBM PC Clone Compatible Software. The Kiss of Death. Why? Fujitsu lost about $1 Billion to Court Judgments for copying the IBM Mainframe software, and did not dare risk another such judgement. Half of that for Fujitsu's Mainframe division, and half for the Amdahl Mainframe company, which Fujitsu bought. Really there was no risk, since the 'Clean Room' method of 'Emulating' a competing software had been proven in US Courts. Quelle Dommage!

[@RaymondHng]

Hey there. It's Raymond Hong. I worked at Fujitsu Microsystems of America in Technical Support during the Fujitsu 2000/2020 Pick Operating System days.

[@sporkstar1911]

This Kanji problem reminds me of the Predator movies and the fact the Predators can only see Infrared... so how did they manage to build technology and become advanced. Answer would be - alot of workarounds and an enormous amount of effort

[@ppokorny99]

I believe in the early 90’s the company I worked for imported an pick and place machine for putting parts on a pcb. It came with a “pc” as the controller but the floppy format was incompatible with US DOS floppy format. I tried for a while to get that machine to communicate with our systems so we could import design data but never succeeded.

[@tachikaze222]

DOS VEE not 5!!!

[@cheaterman49]

So I'm guessing this is in parallel to MSX? Or is it the same thing? I remember cartridge games on an old MSX machine, they were hard but fun!

[@hermangouw]

In 1989-92 I worked for a company named Wilcom which produced CAD/CAM software for embroidery design. Wilcom exported this software to Japan and I still remember Wilcom's partner in Japan sent us a unit of Japanese IBM PC for testing. The unit looked different that the US and international version of IBM PC.

[@taiwanluthiers]

I like to see you do a video on the TI83 calculator. They use a Z80 processor, and still costs 100 dollars, same price as they had sold when they came out. Your phone could run circles around it and it's cheaper.

[@alberoDiSpazio]

Z80 is from the 70s. Consumers are definitely paying a premium. Consumers are paying for form factor and software not to mention they're in grained schools and college placements test.

[@aublak7492]

I was always fascinated by those PC-98 machines. Especially when I saw those wonderful PC-98 games. Even today they still look great. Thanks for filling in the background on these wonderful machines.

[@HetareKing]

This is also a consequence of the special requirements Japanese PCs had. Because kanji require more pixels to be distinguishable from each other than the alphabet, Japanese PCs could run at a higher resolutions with more colours than their western counterparts typically could. This is part of the reason for the split between western and Japanese adventure games: while the former went into the direction of animated point and click games, the latter stuck with a command-driven interface accompanied by high resolution still images.

[@JoseLopez-hp5oo]

Waiting to hear the details on the SMIC 7nm process.

[@IsmailSimba]

For the record, after watching the video, the title "When Wintel Took Over Japan" is quite apt and the views it would bring would be earned.

[@endintiers]

I worked on commercial software for the NEC machines in the late 80s (in Australia) as well as producing freeware for the Japanese market in my spare time. I wrote specifically for Japanese requirements because they were the most likely (by far) to send a contribution. Later I worked for Fujitsu on 'their' mainframe OS. The Japanese programmers I knew from the freeware market were talented, if a little 'random' (a lot of stream-of-consciousness machine code with little structure). Later I did some work for Canon and met their Salaryman developers - they were APPALLINGLY bad. I believe that Japanese business structure prevented Japan from ever being a big player in computer software - the hobbyists and 'rebels' were good but when it got to the large corporations the spark of invention was ruthlessly put out. At Canon for example (in the early 90s) programmers were rated by the number of lines of code they wrote per day - and so they did not do 'loops' but just copied the same code n times etc.

[@alma09876]

"ruthlessly put out" That's because of Japanese "seniority culture".

[@RaymondHng]

Does Fujitsu still manufacture FACOM mainframe computers?

[@rich_in_paradise]

My first (IBM compatible) PC had an NEC V20 processor in it. They were used in Taiwan-manufactured computers exported to the west.

[@yosi1989]

I would like to see you make a video on the overseas development of Japanese PCs in relation to this video. (APC,8001/8801 and other models with A/B prefix released by NECIS and 8801/100/9801 for PRC, etc.)

[@perritsang]

This is ancient history!

[@rarbiart]

today i really learned something. thank you!

[@culturevulture3382]

I see there's a typhoon near Taiwan. Stay safe!

[@peterpayne2219]

There were some really great early hentai games on the PC 98 platform, some of them got ported to DOS and then windows and we sell updated versions of them today.

[@nickj2508]

Fascinating History. I never knew this ever happened.

[@cejannuzi]

Geez, you seemed to have missed much of the history. Plaza Accords, chip quotas, US obstructionism. Japan forced their companies into memory chips and let processors to the US. Japan also stayed away from OSes because the US complained. It never got behind TRON for the desktop, for example. Then came Linux, but Japan never really could do much with it apparently (in terms of making it a desktop replacement for Windows--but then again, no one else has either, except Google with Chrome and Chromebooks). China has been doing more to turn Linux into an 'Asian OS'. Japan did contribute a lot of desktop computing but people don't know it. They developed the laptop form a lot. They helped MS get MS-DOS going. They helped MS revise and improve Windows.

[@bobbinsthethird]

Plaza accords are taken very seriously but a change in exchange rate is what most economies deal with

[@MikiSuzuki2000]

I remember when I lived in the States, a lot of Americans had Toshiba "Dynabooks". That was over a decade ago, and I was just a kid then, so I could have been wrong

[@fffUUUUUU]

NEC V20 CPU has an 8 bit mode in hardware just for the sake of software compatibility with the previous model line.

[@_w_w_]

Awesome video but it also dates me :) I remember all of this and still have one of the first PCs - oh those were the days!

[@julienvincenot7974]

Great video ! I’d be curious to see something similar about the Chinese side, especially how support for Chinese characters came about in PRC and Taiwan.

[@flyingharuka6691]

Chinese character display (mainland) has a shorter journey than Japan, and with Japan ahead, China can quickly adjust its route, entering the DOS/V era almost at the same time as Japan. Compared to Japan using separate hardware to display Chinese characters, Chinese people are not concerned about display speed, so they have developed a font ROM card, inserted it into an ISA slot, and run software to call them.The first to do this was GreatWall 0520. Almost simultaneously, after referring to DOS/V (another saying is that they designed it themselves),chinese designed the CCDOS software package, which can achieve chinese IME/CFP and Chinese character display under VGA and even CGA. Some Chinese software can without Chinese character display environment, so you don't need to install the CCDOS software package. It will automatically switch from 80x25 mode to VGA mode to display Chinese characters. In the wild early 1990s, "HZK16.*"(the file name means Chinese character library 16x16 dots) was a universal Chinese font library that you could copy and call at will, so that no one knew who the author of "HZK16" was.

[@flyingharuka6691]

Other eliminated solutions include PC-9801FC (the “C” means Chinese version), ZD-2000 series (PC8001 Chinese version), and ZD-3000 series (PC-100 Chinese version) from NEC with the main buyer being the military. Fujitsu's FM16 Chinese version (soooo rare), IBM 5550 Chinese version, and so on.

[@julienvincenot7974]

@@flyingharuka6691 very interesting thank you for all the details !