[HN Gopher] What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
___________________________________________________________________
What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
Author : zdw
Score : 262 points
Date : 2024-09-21 22:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.mistys-internet.website)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.mistys-internet.website)
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I never thought about this before, but product competition is
| basically evolution in action. Entities with more desirable
| traits that adapt better to a given ecosystem survive, the rest
| don't. (In addition to things like a pre-existing dominant
| species having advantages over new ones)
|
| (fwiw, Windows won out because it had better business strategy.
| Apple wanted to be in everyone's homes; Microsoft wanted to be in
| everyone's business. One of those is easier to sell to in bulk,
| and easier to charge more money. In addition, Windows being more
| hardware-agnostic, and encouraging an ecosystem of competing
| hardware manufacturers, allowed them to invest less in hardware
| themselves, while creating an industry that would vie for
| business on Microsoft's behalf. This is of course different than
| the "workstation" market of uber-high-powered individual
| computers, which sort-of still exists, though with PC hardware)
| bane wrote:
| Yes! And it's very interesting to consider two additional
| things:
|
| 1. how seemingly "less capable" technologies win out in this
| evolutionary environment
|
| 2. how plentiful VC (and to some extent government funding for
| R&D) distorts normal "evolutionary" forces in a market
| 0134340 wrote:
| 1. In that case those that were adopted tended to be the
| cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies, ie, at a biological
| level just more calorically cheaper to adopt and perhaps
| efficient to maintain.
|
| 2. VC and general funding, ie supporting an entity, is a
| feature of evolution.
|
| I guess I expected better of HN but it seems people don't
| realize that nothing we can do will stop evolution and
| everything we do is just a feature of it.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| Yeah; I think it's our ego, or "common sense", that makes us
| think that the most advanced thing will win out in the end.
| In reality it's the most well-adapted thing that wins out in
| the long term. If you ever see a thing and think "this is
| really advanced, this must be the future", think again.
|
| I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts
| evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist economy.
| Evolution still happens within that ecosystem. The economy is
| the climate, and the laws, politics, people, culture are the
| landscape. That ecosystem includes VCs along with all the
| other things. Within that environment, the best adapted thing
| survives. Sadly, that "thing" (a corporation, for example)
| may make poor decisions that lead to its demise, the way a
| snow leopard leaping for a goat on a mountain side may make
| them both tumble to their doom. Nature's a cruel mistress.
|
| I could even see something like Soviet Russia being an
| ecosystem that evolution still happens in. It's a very
| extreme environment, to be sure, but evolution still happens
| in the most extreme environments on earth.
| bane wrote:
| > I'm not sure I agree that VC, government, etc distorts
| evolution in a democratic republic with a capitalist
| economy. Evolution still happens within that ecosystem.
|
| I'm definitely not claiming that evolution doesn't occur,
| but that the temporary supply of capital that VCs (and
| similar sources) supply creates an artificial environment
| that creates distorted evolutionary pressures. When the VC
| money runs out, and technologies are "returned to a natural
| ecosystem", the end result is often not that the VC funded
| tech was the fittest in the market. Meanwhile, if a
| particular technology consumed the market by distorting its
| fitness function and eliminates otherwise healthy
| competitors along the way, the VC backed tech _might_
| survive in the end, but it 's not clear that it would be
| the fittest given natural market forces. However, everybody
| else is dead.
|
| To really stretch this analogy, it's a bit like an
| environment with several predatory cat species - each good
| at a particular strategy. One day a team of hunters comes
| in, kills all the prey, and selects a specific cat species
| as "the champion" and simply feeds it in captivity. Once
| the rest of the cat species die off, they release the
| champion into the wild where lack of competition stalls its
| own further evolution. What cat would have been the "best"
| in the given ecosystem? Nobody knows.
|
| There's a few interesting cases around this. Palantir comes
| to mind as a particularly useful case. They entered a
| market with a dozen competitors all surviving in the
| market, flooded it with something like 13 or 14 rounds of
| fundraising's worth of product, nearly annihilated
| everybody else in the market and when finally released to
| the wild, found that their signature product line was no
| longer what the market wanted at the size of the market the
| VCs had assumed. Today the company more or less acts as a
| bespoke web application company. Mimic competitors like
| C3.ai are also suffering under similar fates.
|
| For a government funded use-case look no further than the
| space launch market. For decades it was funded by dumb
| government money and regulations that gave the appearance
| of a competitive market but was intended more to ensure
| strategic options. Those companies evolved/optimized to
| capture this steady supply of crippled prey money but it
| really created a bunch of sick, inbred, organizations.
| SpaceX appears, acts like a hungry wild tiger in a room
| full of Pugs and proceeds to dismantle them all, while
| building new markets and capturing the easy prey dripping
| out of the government funnel. There's no magic physics to
| SpaceX, all of the competencies existed in the industrial
| pipeline, but the government funding mechanism evolved them
| in unnatural ways. SpaceX, being heavily government funded,
| may yet evolve into one of those, but for the moment it's
| the difference between a Wolf and a domesticated small
| apartment dog.
| acdha wrote:
| Windows also won by parasitizing a previously bigger host (Bill
| Gates' mother was on IBM's board), and shutting out competition
| by forcing vendors not to offer other companies' software if
| they wanted Microsoft licenses at better than retail pricing.
| nine_k wrote:
| This is how MS-DOS and early Windows won. But the first
| version of MS Excel was written for MacOS. And it's MSO
| what's holding businesses on Windows, not the other way
| around.
| orionblastar wrote:
| MSO doesn't work in WINE at least the latest versions
| don't.
| smegger001 wrote:
| I recall being told that office uses undocumented Windows
| APIs making it harder for groups like WINE and Proton to
| support them. whether or not thats the intent or a happy
| accident well...
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, was not an IBM board member.
|
| She was on the national United Way's executive committee.
| Also an executive committee member was IBM's Chairman, John
| Opel.
|
| see https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-
| gates-64-...
|
| [edit]
|
| also Windows OEMs always got lower than retail price for
| Windows licenses (assuming your volume sold was high enough)
|
| from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Wind
| ows#... :
|
| ====
|
| Microsoft once assessed license fees based on the number of
| computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows
| license was included. Beginning in 1983, Microsoft sold MS-
| DOS licenses to OEMs on an individually negotiated basis. The
| contracts required OEMs to purchase a number of MS-DOS
| licenses equal to or greater than the number of computers
| sold, with the result of zero marginal cost for OEMs to
| include MS-DOS. Installing an operating system other than MS-
| DOS would effectively require double payment of operating
| system royalties. Also, Microsoft penalized OEMs that
| installed alternative operating systems by making their
| license terms less favorable. Microsoft entered into a
| consent decree in 1994 that barred them from conditioning the
| availability of Windows licenses or varying their prices
| based on whether OEMs distributed other operating systems.
|
| ...
|
| In 2009, Microsoft stated that it has always charged OEMs
| about $50 for a Windows license on a $1,000 computer.
|
| ====
| acdha wrote:
| You're right about the boards - it's been a while but the
| main point was that this wasn't just pure open competition
| for their biggest break.
|
| My focus on the licensing was this part which your quote
| included: "Microsoft penalized OEMs that installed
| alternative operating systems by making their license terms
| less favorable". The consent degree and other legal cases
| took a while to apply any effective counter pressure, and
| by that point Microsoft had managed to effectively starve
| competitors (DR-DOS, GEOS, BeOS, OS/2, etc.) of revenue
| which would have made the 80s and 90s marketplace more
| competitive. They knew that staying the default choice for
| businesses as long as possible meant that those companies
| would acquire a library of software and training which only
| worked for their operating systems, and successfully banked
| on a slow government response.
| 0134340 wrote:
| And entities that become too great and harmful to other
| entities (monopolistic) get challenged, even if they can
| provide some good, and from that challenge they sometimes get
| parasitized as well. Business competition, therefore human
| behavior, is natural no matter what way you want to politicize
| it.
| hedora wrote:
| I first figured this out when looking at filesystems. Ext4 is a
| generation behind netapp wafl (from the 1990s). ZFS is arguably
| competitive with some of the enterprise filers from back when
| sun existed.
|
| There have been at least four generations of commercial
| filesystems since then. So, a randomly chosen on-prem filer
| will be 3-5 generations ahead of Linux.
|
| The reason is economic: In that space, companies have a half
| life of 5 years, but influential open source filesystems last
| 20+ years.
| ghaff wrote:
| ZFS would almost certainly be more widely adopted were it
| under a different license. But Red Hat, for one, wasn't going
| to touch it given CDDL.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| We're talking about international trade, so trade barriers and
| foreign policies play a huge role that go beyond simple
| competition.
|
| Japan had a hell of a time to deal with car exports in the US,
| SONY still won but the reaction to it was also extremely
| strong.
|
| A Japanese company had absolutely no chance to go hit the US
| market and displace companies like SUN, Apple or IBM on the US
| soil. In particular software IP is a whole lot harder to fight
| for than manufacturing IP (even if it gets stolen, it's moot if
| it can't be physically applied. In software land reproduction
| is a given)
|
| Europe wasn't much an easier target either. We saw that later
| with docomo failing miserably while having a clearly superior
| product.
|
| In reverse the US has a long history of opening the Japanese
| market when they really want to, and forgoing that market isn't
| critical either, so there's quite an asymmetry.
|
| The only ground Japanese company learned to properly fight has
| been video games so far.
| mcdow wrote:
| Could you speak more to the US "opening the Japanese market
| when they really want to"? I'm not familiar with this.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| A bit far from the technology related fields, but the beef
| import agreements are the most explicit on this part [0].
| US beef was found in clear violation of the safety rules
| multiple times, but Japan had to bend anyway ("The
| government has put priority on the political schedule
| between the two countries, not on food safety or human
| health.").
|
| Japan is typically not doing great in its relationship with
| Korea or China, or even India, nor the EU really (France
| and Germany are closely friendly, but won't give much
| economic benefits), so the US have a pretty strong leverage
| when it comes to negociations.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_beef_import
| s_in_...
|
| PS: there's a mountain of other reasons now, but Japan and
| Russia were also not doing great as they've been fighting
| over the northern islands for decades. To my eyes they
| really really suck at international relations in general.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| i.e. "open up your market to us and stay silent about our
| tariffs on your products, or else"
| pezezin wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Ships#Gunboat_diplomacy
| biorach wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plaza_Accord
| tihwih2o28092 wrote:
| > The only ground Japanese company learned to properly fight
| has been video games so far.
|
| Nintendo yes; Sony PS division is more or less run out of SIE
| in San Mateo.
| FMecha wrote:
| And the rest is nowadays mostly gacha developers, to which
| South Korea and China are also eating up their lunch, even
| at home.
| permo-w wrote:
| is "PC platform" the standard term here? I'm not saying it isn't,
| it just sounds a little odd to me.
| bane wrote:
| Yes, it stands for "Personal Computer Platform".
| bane wrote:
| 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/
|
| memory maps
|
| https://radioc.web.fc2.com/column/pc98bas/pc98memmap_en.htm
|
| https://wiki.osdev.org/Memory_Map_(x86)
| ViktorRay wrote:
| Very interesting! Thanks for posting this!
| ghaff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| NEC and Hitachi were involved as well. There was some sort
| of dynamic of collectively wanting something different from
| commodity x86.
| tkgally wrote:
| 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 "aoa[?]e'" for "robustness", the
| systems engineers I work with prefer "EcEoEXEge'"
| <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.)
| mappu wrote:
| What a wonderful story.
|
| I spent a while playing with `iconv` commands to solve your
| mojibake, reinterpreting bytes in and out of Shift-JIS, but I
| didn't get it - i'd love it if anyone managed to figure out
| the exact encoding,
| bane wrote:
| Oh wow, that's a great personal story.
|
| I would imagine things begin to improve around 2000 due to
| the broad adoption of unicode? I remember there being an
| absolutely huge number of encoding systems for the various
| CJK languages back then, but I think Windows eventually
| guessed/settled on UTF-16 IIR.
|
| I didn't live in Asia during this time, but was heavily
| involved in writing some multilingual capable desktop windows
| software and was very aware of these challenges. I remember
| one colleague who worked on our Chinese language material
| having to buy an expensive copy of a Chinese British
| telegraph code book.
| oefrha wrote:
| In fact, I occasionally run (currently maintained) CJK
| commercial software on my en-US Windows installation and I
| still run into ??? from time to time and have to guess what
| the text is supposed to be. It's a shitshow.
| Laforet wrote:
| There is a system wide setting that changes all non-
| Unicode text encoding to another code page e.g CP932 for
| Shift-JIS. Third party tools are available to do the same
| conversion on a per application basis.
|
| It's not as bad as trying to load some really old CJK web
| pages on mobile devices: few mobile browser has an
| accessible option to select character encoding and there
| appears to be none on iOS. The only option is to change
| the system language and that didn't always work for more
| obscure character codes.
| Lammy wrote:
| https://xupefei.github.io/Locale-Emulator/
| pezezin wrote:
| Heck, the stupid Windows application for the "my number
| card" has this problem, and it is an official application
| coming from the government itself! How is it possible
| that in 2024 we still have this problem?
| creakingstairs wrote:
| Yeah and a part of e-tax literally asks you to have
| Japanese Windows in fine print or it fails silently
| without any warning messages (Fixed by changing chrome
| locale to Japanese thankfully). Gotta love Japanese
| websites. I just go into the office and hand write the
| forms because it beats trying to debug cryptic issues.
| FMecha wrote:
| Many Japanese PC games and desktop applications aimed at
| the home market, from small to large developers, also do
| sort of these things. Just look up the word "AppLocale".
| poincaredisk wrote:
| Between 2010 and 2020 I've ordered something from Amazon
| around 5 times, and each time they spelled my legal name
| wrong, each time in a different way (due to encoding
| issues). And I'm an european, living in a large country.
| So I'm not surprised CJK languages have this problem.
| tkgally wrote:
| > I would imagine things begin to improve around 2000 due
| to the broad adoption of unicode?
|
| Yes. I don't remember the exact timing, but it was the
| switchover to Unicode by Windows and Mac that finally
| resolved the character encoding conflicts (mostly).
|
| I don't know how much attention this got outside Japan, but
| there was significant opposition here to Unicode for a
| while from some Japanese intellectuals. Handwritten and,
| sometimes, typeset Japanese has traditionally allowed for a
| lot of minor variations in the forms of kanji. A person
| might write their name with an extra stroke in one
| character, for example. Some of those variants are ignored
| in Unicode as well as in the Japanese encodings on which it
| is based, and some people kicked up a fuss about it in the
| Japanese press. I remember reading rants accusing Bill
| Gates of trying to suppress Japanese culture by imposing a
| homogenized character encoding through Windows.
|
| The controversy has long since died down, though there have
| been efforts to develop more comprehensive character sets
| of Japanese and other Asian languages, such as TRON Code
| and Mojikyo:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_(encoding)
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojiky%C5%8D
| samatman wrote:
| Oh it gets attention on Hacker News to this day. Any time
| there's a thread about something Unicode one or another
| of our Japanese colleagues will show up to make a fuss
| about how Unicode is quite insufficient for Japanese, for
| this reason or that.
|
| In 2024 I'm out of sympathy for this. There's an entire
| tertiary plane for extended Hanzi/Kanji/ideographs, if
| there are still missing glyphs please take it up with the
| Unicode Consortium, because there's plenty of room and it
| is reasonable to support one (1) character encoding now.
|
| But it is in fact Microsoft's fault that the farcical
| attempt to squeeze "CJK" into a two-byte encoding was
| even attempted. They were firmly committed to the idea
| that UCS-2 could ever be viable and we're stuck with
| various consequences of this fatuous premise to this day.
| Dwedit wrote:
| DOS/V (Not to be confused with the similarly-named MS-DOS 5.0)
| is what made standard PCs able to run Japanese software. It
| provided a software emulation of a full Japanese text mode with
| Kanji, just requiring VGA.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| Going way off the beaten path, this post makes me realize how
| lucky the West was to be able to develop practical computers
| when they did. And it also has me speculating how challenging
| it could be for an alien civilization to develop modern
| computing, depending on the complexity of their interface with
| reality. English is surprisingly utilitarian and
| straightforward for a first pass at a computing device. But one
| could imagine some alien civilization with far more foreign
| concepts of communication struggling to develop practical input
| devices and displays during a primitive computing era.
| Maken wrote:
| It's not the English language but the latin alphabet that
| helped there. It had already been optimised in ancient times
| to a limited set of easily readable characters, and then was
| further standardised by the introduction of the printing
| press. Going from a collection of metal pieces to a
| collection of bitmaps is way easier than adapting a
| handwritten languaje (which already had problems adapting to
| the printing press).
| smegger001 wrote:
| >which already had problems adapting to the printing press
|
| as i recall the printing press was developed in the East
| first. Each page was essentially a wood cut and pressed on
| to the page, the major innovation that Gutenberg in the
| west had was movable type more than the press.
| qwytw wrote:
| > was movable type
|
| And even then, Chinese had already used movable type ~400
| years before Guttenberg, possibly even for "serial
| numbers" on printed banknotes. The oldest surviving book
| printed with movable type was published in the late 1370s
| in Korea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jikji.
|
| Even woodblock printing, while it was seemingly know in
| Europe or at least the Byzantine Empire since the 11-13th
| centuries only became heavily commercialized and
| widespread around the same time as Gutenberg's press
| pretty much in parallel with it (for playing cards,
| illustrated books etc.).
|
| There was something special about Europe in the 1400s.
| I'm not downplaying his skills/ingenuity but Gutenberg's
| greatest achievement was doing what he did at the right
| time and place. It seems there wasn't enough demand for
| books/printed materials that would have justified the
| needed investments anywhere else.
| wrp wrote:
| Another thing about the development of movable type. I've
| heard that Gutenberg's main contribution was the
| development of an alloy that made metal type feasible,
| and that the (earlier) Korean solution was to use ceramic
| type.
| qwytw wrote:
| They also tried bronze and copper as well (mainly for
| money which used a mix of plate and movable type).
|
| The transition from wood to bronze metal type might have
| independent in Korea, though. They even had a pretty
| extensive printing industry as far as we can tell but it
| was fully controlled by the state/emperor and non
| official printing was illegal.
|
| I'm certainly not an expert but at least in China's case
| the type of inks they used didn't really work well with
| metal or even ceramic type which probably made the
| process relatively inefficient.
|
| Butyeah, Guttenberg invented a new alloy, ink, moulding
| method which made the process much cheaper and more
| effective.
| christkv wrote:
| I think it coincided with a growing demand of reading
| material as the merchant class expanded.
| pjc50 wrote:
| The Gutenberg museum itself has an exhibition of Korean
| movable type. See also https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/c
| ulture/2021/06/145_311325.... : both Hanzi and Hangeul.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| I think at this point we understand that 'inventing' or
| 'discovering' means coming up with the solution/discovery
| that took off in modern culture/usage in a way that
| shaped our current world.
| bane wrote:
| To add to this, there are some specific characteristics or
| acceptable practices within European alphabets (by the time
| that computers were invented) that helped.
|
| - The total number of characters needing representation is
| small. In the most limited case, you can get by with just
| the majuscule (upper case) characters. This means you can
| represent all letters in just a few bits. Representing all
| upper + lower + numbers + basic punctuation for almost any
| single language in Europe, even non-latinate languages is
| possible in just 7 or 8 bits!
|
| - The glyphs are linearized in a consistent direction. So
| data storage to display logic is very simple. This is
| opposed to languages like Korean where characters are
| assembled into syllables and text can flow left to right
| horizontally or right to left vertically.
|
| - Most European languages have both print and cursive
| forms. By the 20th century it was acceptable to use the
| disconnected print form, which made display logic much
| simpler (just copy the 8x8 bitmap in ROM to the screen).
| But importantly, special semi-ornamental characters, like
| ligatures, were acceptable to separate.
|
| - A more or less universal base-10 number system meant that
| we only needed to include 10 digits in the character set.
| Arithmetic only requires a handful of symbols. So you can
| include a pretty big subset of math in your character
| encoding. This is opposed to other systems that use
| distinct characters in ways similar to Roman numerals (e.g.
| Chinese numerals which also have financial and lay versions
| of counting).
|
| - Punctuation and simple arithmetic characters had been
| basically boiled down to about a dozen glyphs.
|
| - If you use 8-bits for your character encoding, you have
| _so much_ space you can also include pretty much every
| character variant needed for all Latin using languages,
| allowing you to hit an addressable market of billions of
| people with the same 16k ROM.
| aurizon wrote:
| Your analysis is correct. I recall in the mid 80's a number of
| Japanese PC's emerged. They all seemed to want to make a walled
| garden so they could sell add-ons into it for extra $$, while,
| as you say 'the hills are alive' with mass made items for the
| emergent PC standard enabled by Microsoft's provision by
| sale/licence of MS-DOS while preserving their ability to sell
| fully compatible same-ware. There was only a small hurdle, the
| IBM BIOS, which IBM lawyered to death any and all copiers. Soon
| clean-room original BIOSes were created by a few companies and
| the gold rush was on. IBM had lost all hope, but sold enough to
| business and governments to make a good business. They tried a
| walled garden with OS2 and their MCA(Micro-channel
| architecture) bus. All US PC makers jumped on this, millions of
| plug in cards were made - buyers - crickets, crickets,
| crickets, I suspect many billions went down that rabbit hole. I
| recall one scrap salvager processing tens of thousands of
| Zenith MCA boards for gold a few years later. The Japanese
| finally saw the light and focussed on laptops and those had a
| good run, but finally they faded, IBM also made their think-
| pads, but eventually sold to Lenovo. Us makers - Dell, Apple
| and HP persist - I am not sure which are US made? https://en.wi
| kipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laptop_brands_and_manu....
| FMecha wrote:
| >(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)
|
| I originally thought might have confused it with the X68K,
| whose it's closeness to arcade hardware such as Capcom CPS-1
| allowed for near (but not fully, contrary to popular belief)
| perfect ports possible at the time. (Capcom even sold a
| Genesis/SNES controller converter for X68K for the Street
| Fighter II ports.) However, the FM Towns does have its own
| share of arcade ports, mainly involving Sega, Taito and Capcom
| titles, such as After Burner, Operation Wolf and Super Street
| Fighter II, respectively.
|
| On FM Towns side, their commercial games list appears to be
| intermediate between X68K's "arcade at home" experience and
| PC-98's graphics that prioritize RPGs and visual novels (often
| smut in nature) due to PC-98's graphics capabilities that
| benefitted static graphics. (No PC-98 mention/discussion is
| complete if eroge is not brought up at one point anyway.)
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| Taiwan had similar problems for Traditional Chinese in the
| early days. Their solutions were specific hardware cards in the
| beginning, then software-only OS compatible with IBM. It is not
| necessary to reinvent the wheel.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Also worth watching: Why is Japan So Weak in Software? by
| Asianometry
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso
| terminalgravity wrote:
| I wish there was a TL;DW bot to summarize a videos like this.
| I'm curious but not in a place i could easily watch a video.
| drekipus wrote:
| Watch later
| TowerTall wrote:
| Someone posted this link on HN a short while ago
|
| https://www.tldw.pro/
| cglong wrote:
| You can ask Gemini to summarize a YouTube video for you! Also
| if you have YouTube Premium on Android, you can ask questions
| about the current video.
|
| Here's Gemini's summary of GP's video:
| https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f
| hedora wrote:
| Alibaba just released 100 large models. One takes a 20
| second video and summarizes it.
|
| Now I wonder if it supports audio. If so, I want the
| relevant browser plugin so I can read YouTube on my
| machine!
| chmod775 wrote:
| Asianometry's videos are good precisely because of the detail
| and background he goes into. If you summarize them you take
| that away and pretty much just end up with what has already
| been said here.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| It's a 20 minute long video, the information density can
| almost certainly be denser.
| chmod775 wrote:
| > It's a 20 minute long video
|
| You mean 20 minutes _short_. There 's enough in there to
| blow it up into a 45 minute documentary at least. You
| already spent more than 20 minutes commenting under this
| story.
|
| > The information density can almost certainly be denser.
|
| And what would be the point of that? There's a limited
| amount of information one can retain in a short span of
| time, and it's not like he repeats himself or has a
| verbose style.
|
| I already go back and rewatch his videos later, taking
| new pieces of information from them.
|
| Again, if you want the tldw, it's already in the comments
| here. If you want the details, go watch the video.
|
| The video is being linked _because the video itself is
| good_. Wanting a summary that retains the same qualities
| is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| I generally read faster than some narrator slowly
| babbling on over a meandering script, so that is 20
| minutes _long_. If the video is 20 minutes long, I wager
| I can read an equivalent article in less than 5 minutes
| and come out enlightened all the same.
|
| Videos are great for getting the eyes of the general man
| who doesn't have a preconceived interest in a subject,
| you're trying to bait clicks and videos are great for
| that. For people already interested in the subject
| though? Videos are almost always a literal waste of time
| compared to a well written article.
|
| And if you wanna say I have a short attention span: Sue
| me. I'm a 35 year old millenial, we're infamous for
| having short attention spans.
| SllX wrote:
| You my friend may benefit from developing the arts of the
| 2x speed, the skipping, the scrubbing _and_ the stopping.
|
| Not every video is worth watching to completion (some
| are, you get a feel for it), there may be background
| details you want to skip or scrub through eyeballing the
| thumbnails depending on familiarity with the subject
| matter and sometimes everything you want to know is right
| at the end of the video in a neat little summary. The
| comments can even give you some insight into where the
| video is going and whether you want to continue if you
| read through some of the top ones during playback.
|
| I'm not much younger than you, but watching and re-pacing
| YouTube for educational/information videos is a skill
| that can be refined and the visual imagery can provide
| details that again, depending on what it is, might be
| missed in a written summary. And hey, if none of this is
| for you, maybe this comment helps someone else out.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I mean... you can do that, yes. Or we could use the far
| superior medium of text, where you don't need hacks to
| get around how slow it is.
| SllX wrote:
| I mean you could restrict yourself to only a single
| medium, independent of what the rest of the world is
| doing; or you can learn to process information
| efficiently regardless of medium and respect each medium
| for its own strengths and weaknesses. A good YouTube
| video produced perfectly needs none of the "hacks" I
| listed above and will relay far more information on
| complex subject matter in context than just an essay
| will, but people are more comfortable writing will write
| and people who want to make videos will make videos.
| ddingus wrote:
| This too is the way.
|
| I am quite happy to take good info produced for me in
| almost any form.
|
| We all have options.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There is a slight conflict of interest where more money
| can be earned by wasting the information recipient's time
| via advertising. Text offers less opportunity to do this.
|
| Perhaps some amount of time wastage is necessary to
| incentivize the information providers to provide the
| information, but the pendulum can also swing too far.
| SllX wrote:
| That's why I got good at getting through videos quickly
| and figuring out when or if they're a waste of time.
|
| There's plenty of "research" videos that are just spewing
| crap that can be found on a wiki or a database somewhere
| else on the web; but see enough of them and you pick up
| on the pattern and cadence and quality they're produced
| at quickly enough to just move on when you see it.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| One reasonable compromise would be for video makers to
| provide a transcript or written article to complement
| their video. Video is a terrible format especially when
| you're actually using the video and not just using it as
| a mechanism to deliver audio. Audio is not a bad medium
| because you can do something else while listening to it.
| ddingus wrote:
| This is the way, along with just listening during other
| tasks.
| ddingus wrote:
| Same. Reading is always faster than watching video.
|
| However, listening to one can be done while driving, or
| doing many other tasks.
|
| Expecting producers to cater to the can read fast crowd
| is not realistic. People are just not going to produce
| for us. And I do not believe they should.
|
| There are options. A big one is listening.
| smegger001 wrote:
| especially now with you tubers vainly trying to placate
| the fickle algorithm gods by stretching out videos to
| meet time minimum lengths
| ddingus wrote:
| Yeah. Can't blame 'em for that. It sucks, and I bet most
| of them hate doing it.
| nottorp wrote:
| > If the video is 20 minutes long, I wager I can read an
| equivalent article in less than 5 minutes and come out
| enlightened all the same.
|
| Not to mention that skimming through this page of HN
| comments does NOT take 20 minutes. More like 45 seconds.
|
| > And if you wanna say I have a short attention span
|
| Short life. Not attention span. If you get your info in
| writing you waste 4x as little of your life getting it.
| Xelbair wrote:
| Video by itself is less information dense than text. 20
| mintute video could've been a 2-5min read essay.
|
| Not to mention the convinience of being able to easily
| re-read parts of it, and find reveland information
| instead of seeking the video.
| ddingus wrote:
| Nope. That producer packs it in solid. Yes, it could be
| more dense, but at the expense of it being watchable by
| most people.
|
| This is a case of just because one can does not mean one
| should.
|
| Having an audience matters. It matters more than optimal
| info density does. Besides, just watch it at 2x. With
| this producer doing that is challenging. Pay attention!
|
| :)
| rowanG077 wrote:
| I don't understand this argument. What has video length
| to do with whether it can be denser? This is like looking
| at a 1gb file and saying it could certainly be smaller.
| ddingus wrote:
| The commenter believes the video should take less time
| and contain a higher percentage of strictly factual
| information.
|
| A text analogy might be a recipe written in simple style,
| steps, ingredients, etc. and one you might find on a food
| blog where there is an intro about their childhood, how
| Nana was the best and along the way, somewhere in there
| one might learn how to prepare the food.
|
| In this case, the video producer made pretty good choices
| about info density and content length.
|
| The commenter disagrees and here we are chatting about
| all that.
| immibis wrote:
| I tend to bookmark Asianometry videos to watch later
| because they seem very informative but I'm rarely in the
| mood to actually listen to the very dry documentary style.
| They don't make good background noise for instance - I need
| to focus to accept the new information. At the same time
| they don't naturally attract my focus.
| ranger_danger wrote:
| there are many such sites if you just google for them
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You do you, but I'd chime in on why it's not recommended: any
| simple answer to that question will just be "there's a long
| history and international context that led to a complex
| situation".
|
| That's the perfect TL;DW but I don't think it helps you much.
|
| 20 min is short for such a vague question, and you can watch
| at 2+x the speed if info density is so paramount.
|
| To note it still glosses over an incredible amount of
| critical things, it's just not a topic that can be shortened
| that much for anyone actually caring about understanding it.
| nottorp wrote:
| > 20 min is short for such a vague question, and you can
| watch at 2+x the speed if info density is so paramount.
|
| Interesting how a lot of defenders just assume delivering
| the same info in writing is not feasible.
|
| Has the skill to read/write become a competitive advantage
| again, like in the medieval ages when 0.1% of the
| population knew how to do it?
| makeitdouble wrote:
| To me it comes down to how the creator decided to publish
| their piece.
|
| If there is no specific accessibility need, getting it in
| the original format on the chose platform would be my
| primary choice. In particular it's not a time sensitive
| subject and watch it later sounds easy enough.
|
| You seem to put reading/writing on a pedestal, but as you
| point out we're not in the medieval ages anymore, nobody
| should feel superior because they read it instead of
| watching it.
| nottorp wrote:
| > You seem to put reading/writing on a pedestal
|
| No, I put my personal time on a pedestal. Videos are
| slow, and I'd rather spend my life in other ways.
| Xelbair wrote:
| No, i just value my time and ability to search
| information.
|
| plus i'm unable to consume media in the 'background'.
| skissane wrote:
| I didn't watch the video but I skim read the YouTube
| transcript.
|
| The video doesn't propose any single explanation, just a
| series of events all of which arguably set back Japan's
| indigenous software industry. A few of the incidents it
| mentions include (my summary below is more based on my own
| knowledge of the topic, than what the video specifically
| mentions):
|
| Fujitsu and Hitachi cloned IBM mainframes. So did lots of
| other companies. At the time they started doing it, IBM was
| (intentionally) releasing their software into the public
| domain. However, in 1969, IBM announced they'd start
| copyrighting their software. Initially they still released
| the core OS (primarily MVS) into the public domain, and only
| copyrighted add-ons. However, as the 1970s progressed, more
| and more new functionality went into the copyrighted add-ons,
| while the public domain core received only limited
| enhancements. Finally, in the early 1980s, they put the whole
| OS under copyright. This left Fujitsu and Hitachi in a
| difficult position. They were used to getting their mainframe
| OS from IBM for free, and suddenly they couldn't legally do
| that any more. Legal choices for them would have included:
| (1) fork IBM's operating system and create new enhancements
| themselves (either clone IBM's copyrighted enhancements by
| clean-room engineering, or design their own incompatible
| enhancements), (2) negotiate with IBM for a license (unclear
| if IBM would agree, and may have cost $$$), (3) license an
| alternative operating system (e.g. UNIX), (4) build their own
| OS from scratch. But none of those options appealed to them
| (or maybe they tried some and it wasn't working out), so they
| decide to go with option (5): illegally copy IBM's
| copyrighted mainframe operating systems. They used the fact
| that IBM still shipped the source code for much of its
| copyrighted software to customers, and somehow got customers
| to (illegally) hand that source code over. They made rather
| trivial changes to the source code to try to hide the
| copying-for example, Fujitsu renamed a lot of IBM routines
| whose name started with the letter I, to start with the
| letter J instead. They searched and replaced IBM copyright
| notices with their own. They even bribed IBM employees to
| give them IBM confidential material (the IBM employees
| accepted the bribes as part of an FBI sting operation). And
| IBM found out, and sued both Fujitsu and Hitachi, and the
| settlement of the suit required Fujitsu and Hitachi to pay
| IBM hundreds of millions of dollars, and also banned Fujitsu
| and Hitachi from continuing to sell the software outside
| Japan (IBM agreed to let them continue selling it in Japan,
| in exchange for them paying licensing fees.)
|
| Other stuff I know about this topic (not in the video): In
| the 1980s and early 1990s, Fujitsu mainframes were quite
| popular in Australia, but due to this settlement, by the end
| of the 1990s, basically all of Fujitsu's Australian mainframe
| customers had either migrated to IBM mainframes, or else to
| non-mainframe platforms. There are still Fujitsu and Hitachi
| mainframes running in Japan today, but they are deeply
| legacy, basically stuck in the 1990s - they didn't follow
| IBM's transition to 64-bit in 2001. Fujitsu and Hitachi
| weren't the only mainframe vendors faced with this problem,
| but other vendors sought to solve it within the confines of
| the law. In the US, Amdahl had the same issue, but it decided
| to focus on their Unix variant UTS instead of MVS. (Amdahl
| did have an internal project to build a clone of IBM's MVS,
| apparently based on legal clean-room reverse engineering,
| called Aspen, but it got caught in development hell, and
| Amdahl cancelled it before they ever officially shipped it,
| although possibly a few customers got beta test versions.)
| Germany's Nixdorf had a fork of IBM's DOS/VS operating system
| (for low-end mainframes), which they got by acquiring the
| American company TCSC; they ported the Unix clone Coherent to
| run on top of it, before killing it off in the late 1980s
| when Nixdorf decided to give up on mainframes and focus
| purely on Unix instead. Other mainframe vendors didn't have
| this problem because their operating systems were not based
| on IBM's - for example, the other Japanese mainframe vendor,
| NEC, their mainframes run a fork of GE/Honeywell/Bull's GCOS
| operating system (ACOS), which NEC legally licensed.
|
| Another incident the video discusses is the TRON project,
| which was a Japanese indigenous standard for operating system
| APIs, endorsed by the Japanese government, conceptually
| similar to POSIX. It included both variants aimed at general
| purpose computing (BTRON) and embedded systems (ITRON).
| However, this frightened the US software industry, which
| convinced the US government to declare TRON a "trade
| barrier". And that mostly killed TRON as an operating system.
| TRON didn't die completely, it still sees some use in
| embedded systems even today (the video mentions the Nintendo
| Switch Joy-Con controllers run it), but it never achieved the
| original vision of becoming Japan's standard operating
| system. Instead, Microsoft Windows did.
|
| And then there were also macroeconomic issues (Japan's real
| estate crisis in the 1990s), and cultural issues - it
| mentions how the Japanese government encouraged Japanese
| industry to focus on copying successful Western technologies,
| even improving them incrementally in the process, as opposed
| to coming up with fundamentally novel technologies of their
| own. That approach served Japan very well for industries such
| as cars, but doesn't work so well for the software industry.
| rvba wrote:
| It makes sense to have one stanfard across the world. This
| way good software can come from multiple countries.
|
| But... killing TRON probably helped a lot. Look at consoles
| - somehow nintendo can come with good software made by
| good, creative programmers.
|
| Maybe the soft was killed by trade barriers.. and more
| trivial things - such as software developer being a poorly
| paid dead end job in Japan?
| skissane wrote:
| > It makes sense to have one stanfard across the world.
| This way good software can come from multiple countries.
|
| TRON was not the only attempt to define a standardised
| operating system API in the 1980s. As well as TRON and
| POSIX, another was IEEE Std 855-1990 (Microprocessor
| Operating System Interface or MOSI for short). But POSIX
| was the only one which really succeeded.
|
| MOSI is pretty obscure, but my impression of what
| happened there - in the early 1980s, 8-bit platforms were
| widely popular, but very incompatible with each other
| (e.g. software written for Apple II could not run on
| Commodore 64 even though they both had 6502 CPUs). So the
| proposal for a common OS API was made, and an IEEE
| standards committee started standardising it. But by the
| time the standard was finished, those 8-bit platforms
| were declining, and IEEE was left with a standard focused
| on the needs of a declining market, and so very few ever
| used it. [0] (MOSI itself isn't inherently 8-bit - like
| POSIX it is a source-level standard rather than a binary-
| level standard, so could be used on 16-bit or 32-bit
| systems - but its feature set was a lowest common
| denominator of what 8-bit systems supported, so not very
| attractive for machines that have the memory to do much
| more.)
|
| In 1988, the Japanese education ministry decided to make
| BTRON the standard operating system for Japanese schools.
| From what I understand, this move frightened Microsoft
| (among others), who feared that it would prevent
| DOS/Windows from being used in Japanese schools, or else
| force Microsoft to add a BTRON compatibility subsystem to
| their operating systems. So Microsoft lobbied the US
| government to pressure the Japanese government, and that
| pressure resulted in the Japanese education ministry
| dropping the requirement for BTRON, which in turn largely
| killed BTRON off. It didn't completely die; a variant of
| BTRON (Cho-Kanji) continues to be developed into this
| century, but it is a niche product whose primary value
| proposition is far more comprehensive support for obscure
| Kanji characters than mainstream Unicode-based operating
| systems (maybe useful if you do research into historical
| Japanese texts). Another factor in killing the Japanese
| education ministry's requirement for BTRON, was domestic
| opposition from NEC - at the time, NEC PC-98 machines
| running DOS were the _de facto_ standard in the Japanese
| education system, and BTRON threatened NEC 's dominance
| of that market. It could well have been a combination of
| both external pressure from the US government and
| internal pressure from NEC that killed it.
|
| Related is Ada Programming Support Environment (APSE) and
| Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS). Part of the US DOD
| project which resulted in Ada, whose requirements
| demanded not only a standard programming language, but
| also a standard development environment, with APIs for
| integrating with compilers, editors, version control,
| build tools, etc. CAIS is standardised in MIL STD-1838A.
| So it is like POSIX/MOSI/BTRON, a cross-operating system
| API, albeit one focused on the needs of software
| development rather than general purpose computing-
| implementations of CAIS existed for Unix, OpenVMS and
| MVS, so development tools written against the CAIS API
| could run on all three operating systems. And the US
| government poured untold amounts of money into it, but
| I'm not sure if anyone ever used it. Probably some
| military projects did.
|
| And APSE/CAIS in turn inspired PCTE (Portable Common Tool
| Environment), which was basically the EU's answer to
| APSE/CAIS. And just like APSE/CAIS, it consumed large
| quantities of EU research funding, before eventually
| being forgotten without ever seeing much if any real
| world use. It is standardised as ISO/IEC 13719-which
| apparently nobody uses, but ISO keeps on renewing because
| withdrawing a standard consumes bureaucratic resources,
| and PCTE is so obscure nobody even wants to expend the
| effort on withdrawing it.
|
| [0] There was an implementation of MOSI for CP/M-80 and
| Pascal-MT+ - you can find it at
| https://github.com/skissane/MOSI/ - but I doubt that ever
| saw much use.
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Siemens did real mainframes and their mainframe OS BS2000
| is still around, it's just part of Fujitsu, Nixdorf appears
| in that story as well because that's how the Siemens
| mainframe division ended up at FSC (Siemens acquires
| Nixdorf, folds its mainframe division into that, then
| splits it up into the ATM business and sells the rest to
| Fujitsu).
| skissane wrote:
| Nixdorf shut down their mainframe business in 1989, and
| sold the remnants to Comparex (which started out as a
| Siemens-BASF joint venture, but Siemens withdrew around
| the same time as Comparex acquired Nixdorf's mainframe
| business). So when Siemens and Nixdorf merged in 1990,
| Siemens did not acquire Nixdorf's mainframe business,
| only Nixdorf's other product lines (Unix systems, ATMs,
| etc). But Siemens still had their own mainframe business.
| Comparex already sold IBM-compatible mainframes, so they
| didn't continue Nixdorf's mainframes as an independent
| hardware line, they were primarily buying the support
| contracts and the customer base.
|
| Siemens mainframes and Nixdorf mainframes had significant
| differences:
|
| Siemens BS2000 mainframes were derived from RCA Spectra
| 70. Their ISA was mostly IBM-compatible in user mode
| (problem state), but significantly different in kernel
| mode (supervisor state), and their operating system was
| completely incompatible-the BS2000 operating system was
| derived from RCA TSOS. RCA sold their mainframe business
| to Sperry, who then merged with Burroughs to form Unisys.
| The RCA Spectra mainframes became Unisys' Series 90
| mainframe line, and RCA TSOS was renamed to Unisys VS/9.
| But by the 1980s or early 1990s, the RCA-derived Unisys
| mainframe line was dead. Whereas, their Sperry and
| Burroughs heritage mainframe lines (Unisys OS 2200 and
| Unisys MCP) survive today, although now they are software
| emulators running on x86-64 servers instead of physical
| hardware. RCA Spectra/TSOS only survives today in the
| BS2000 branch, save that Siemens ended up selling it to
| Fujitsu.
|
| By contrast, the Nixdorf mainframes were more straight
| IBM clones, and so aimed for instruction set
| compatibility both at the user application and operating
| system level, and could run IBM operating systems. They
| were mainly used with the low-end IBM DOS/360-derived
| operating systems rather than the high-end MVS operating
| system family. Nixdorf faced the same problem that
| Fujitsu and Hitachi did, of IBM closing their operating
| systems, but they solved it by buying the American
| software company TCSC, who maintained their own fork of
| the IBM mainframe DOS, called Edos, which Nixdorf then
| renamed NIDOS (Nixdorf DOS). TCSC had started Edos when
| IBM decided to make new DOS versions available only for
| S/370, not for older S/360 machines, hence Edos was
| originally a backport of those newer S/370-only DOS
| versions to the older S/360 machines. When Nixdorf bought
| TCSC, they renamed it NCSC. NIDOS ended up offering
| features that IBM DOS/VSE never had, like a Unix
| compatibility subsystem (PWS/VSE-AF, derived from
| Coherent) - much latter, MVS (now z/OS) and VM/CMS (now
| z/VM) ended up getting one, but DOS/VSE (later z/VSE and
| now VSE^n since IBM offloaded it to 21CSW) never has.
|
| Siemens also once had a lower-end mainframe line, which
| ran an operating system optimised for smaller machines,
| BS1000. BS1000 was discontinued long ago, and there is
| little information about it online. There was a BS1000
| compatibility subsystem for BS2000, called SIM-BS1000
| [0], but I'd be surprised if anyone is still using it
| today.
|
| And Siemens also had BS3000 mainframes - like Nixdorf
| mainframes, these were fully IBM compatible, and designed
| to be able to run IBM's operating systems - they ran the
| Siemens BS3000 operating system, which was a rebadging of
| Fujitsu MSP - Fujitsu stolen version of IBM MVS. Siemens
| had to enter into a settlement with IBM as a result,
| although I'm led to believe the terms were relatively
| lenient on Siemens, who did their best to portray
| themselves as innocent victims of Fujitsu's dishonesty.
| But that was the end of BS3000. I think the remnants of
| the Siemens BS3000 line ended up with Comparex too.
| Comparex finally shut down their IBM-compatible mainframe
| business in 2000; they survived as an IT services
| business until 2019, when they were acquired by
| SoftwareOne.
|
| And then in 1999 Siemens transferred their mainframe
| business to the Fujitsu-Siemens joint venture, and in
| 2009 Fujitsu bought out Siemens, and hence Fujitsu ended
| up with Siemens mainframe business.
|
| And so today Fujitsu has three totally incompatible
| mainframe lines - their own Fujitsu MSP mainframes
| (previously sold internationally but now only surviving
| in Japan), the ex-Siemens BS2000 (primarily surviving in
| Germany, although a little bit in the UK and a few other
| European countries), and the VME mainframes they got by
| buying ICL in 2002 (I believe the UK government is the
| sole remaining user, they really want to migrate off them
| but it is just too hard.) Both BS2000 and VME now run
| under x86-64, while I believe the Japanese line still has
| proprietary physical hardware.
|
| [0] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-642-6
| 7415-0_...
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I had tried to figure out some of the details of TRON but
| some are difficult to find due to being Japanese and/or
| some files seems to be missing.
|
| (I think ITRON is still in use, but BTRON and CTRON are not
| as common these days, as far as I know.)
|
| There is also FOSS implementation of BTRON called B-Free
| but it is seems to be incomplete, and as far as I can tell
| is abandoned. (There is also year 2053 problem, which could
| be mitigated by using 64-bit timestamps, and some other
| problems.)
|
| (I had also had idea of my own operating system design,
| which also uses TRON character code, as well as other
| things. This can also be made operating system standard
| which multiple implementations could be made up, I would
| hope.)
| Findecanor wrote:
| I tend to just listen to Asianometry as a podcast while
| resting or doing menial tasks at home.
| littlecranky67 wrote:
| There is kagi (paid search engine) summarizer for youtube
| videos: https://kagi.com/summarizer
|
| As for the above link, it gives:
|
| "Japan has a large trade deficit in software, importing far
| more software and services than it exports. Despite having
| iconic hardware companies, Japan lacks major software giants
| like Microsoft or Oracle. This is due to a history of
| government policies that favored hardware over software
| development, as well as a shortage of skilled software
| engineers and a lack of software startups in Japan. While
| Japan has made efforts to develop domestic software
| platforms, they have largely failed to gain traction. The
| video suggests there are no easy solutions to Japan's
| software industry challenges."
| aeadio wrote:
| Asianometry also has a video on the history of the Japanese PC
| market,
|
| https://youtu.be/CEtgzO-Im8w
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Reminds me of a Japanese software company I applied and
| interviewed at when I graduated university. Company name? Bug
| Software.
|
| A quick internet search shows no relevant results for the
| company.
| ripcity512 wrote:
| Was this the place?
|
| bug.co.jp
|
| Apparently they changed their name last year.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| That looks like it!
|
| Thanks.
| PhasmaFelis wrote:
| I was gonna say, the same thing that happened to all the western
| PC platforms that weren't Microsoft or Apple. Commodore and Atari
| and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and probably dozens of others
| I've never heard of. As computers became more powerful and
| development costs rose, small-market architectures and OSes
| simply became unsustainable. You had to either reach sustained
| global success or die.
|
| I'm sure there were some unique challenges for architectures that
| mainly served Japan, but I doubt they were _that_ much worse than
| the ones facing the ones that mainly served, say, Britain. All of
| them lost the race in the end.
|
| The same thing happened again with graphical cellphones! In the
| flip-phone era there were a zillion different OSes with their own
| app libraries. For a while it looked like Blackberry was set to
| be the Microsoft of the upcoming smartphone era, and then Apple
| stole their thunder, and no one could compete except Android and
| Windows Phone, and then Windows Phone dropped out too, and now
| we're back to two basic architectures with no meaningful
| competitors, just like the home PC market by 1996.
|
| > By 1994 though, they had a problem: the 32-bit consoles were
| out, which could do 2D games just as well as the FM Towns and
| X68000, and the consoles could also do 3D that blew away anything
| those computers could handle.
|
| This line from the article caught my eye in particular, because
| it's similar to what happened to Commodore's Amiga, one of the
| last real Microsoft competitors in the West. Essentially, Doom
| killed it. There's a rather tragic list of Amiga games that
| struggled valiantly to be Doom on that platform, and some of them
| were pretty good but none of them could really match what Id
| could with a tricked-out DOS machine in 1993, and that was more
| or less that.
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and
| probably dozens of others I've never heard of.
|
| Let's not forget the french. They had Oric, Matra (IIRC),
| Thomson and... The Minitel.
|
| And now they're absolutely nowhere to be seen, just like Japan:
| it's either PCs (basically running Windows or a Un*x) or Macs.
| Narishma wrote:
| Oric was British.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| How about the US and MS ruining everything as usual?
|
| "In April 1989 the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued
| a preliminary report accusing BTRON of being a trade barrier, as
| it only functioned in Japan, and asked the Japanese government
| not to make it standard in schools. TRON was included along with
| rice, semiconductors, and telecommunications equipment in a list
| of items targeted by Super-301 (complete stop of import based on
| section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of
| 1988). It was removed from the list after the USTR inspection
| team visited the TRON Association in May. In June the Japanese
| government expressed their regret at U.S. intervention but
| accepted this request not to make it standard in schools, thus
| ending the BTRON project. Callon opines that the project had
| nevertheless run into such difficulties that the U.S.
| intervention allowed the government to save face from cancelling
| the project.
|
| According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US
| officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in
| computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the
| TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's
| processors as a global standard. In the 1980s Microsoft had at
| least once lobbied Washington about TRON until backing off, but
| Ken Sakamura himself believed Microsoft wasn't the impetus behind
| the Super-301 listing in 1989. Known for his off the cuff
| remarks, in 2004 governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara mentioned in
| his column post concerning international trade policy that TRON
| was dropped because Carla Anderson Hills had threatened Ryutaro
| Hashimoto over it."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_Project
| Dalewyn wrote:
| No; Japan would have eventually stumbled and fell into
| obscurity even without any American interference. It's a
| running joke at this point, because Japanese cannot compromise
| quality to make costs reasonable.
|
| In an environment where the world produces goods 80~90% as good
| as Japanese ones for 1/4th~1/8th the cost, who in their right
| mind buys Japanese? This is what happened to Japan's entire
| electronics industry, home appliance industry, and more. Japan
| still has a domestic computer industry by a technicality (it's
| all Made In China) primarily fended over by Hitachi and
| Panasonic, but most westerners likely won't know because they
| simply don't sell overseas.
|
| I'm not going to bother getting into how Japanese are horrible
| with software too.
| hakfoo wrote:
| The cost/quality thing doesn't mean they couldn't have
| maintained a "halo product" line that steered the platform.
| It could have been like the early 1990s PC market: government
| with a 'buy domestic' mandate or budget-no-object buyers
| might have bought a PS/2 Model 80 or Deskpro 386, but the
| masses, especially overseas, would buy a white-box 386DX made
| of Taiwanese parts.
|
| There's an interesting contrast: while Japan produced MSX-- a
| clear example that a multi-vendor standard can be wildly
| successful-- they missed the idea of a clone ecosystem for
| their heavier-duty professional machines. Why weren't there
| vendors cranking out clones of the PC-98, FM Towns, or
| X68000? Did they require more propriatery special sauce than
| an IBM 5150, or was there a cultural/market difficulty that
| would have caused them to flop on the market?
|
| OTOH, perhaps part of the problem was that the features Japan
| needed had poor cost/benefit ratios outside of the CJK
| market: you either have to make the enhanced video stuff
| optional, reducing platform standardization, or charge people
| for a feature they don't see as immediately beneficial.
| hedora wrote:
| My switch and midrange sony tv (which just turned ten years
| old, and is still "good enough") seem like decent
| counterexamples.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > It's a running joke at this point, because Japanese cannot
| compromise quality to make costs reasonable.
|
| An old anecdote:
|
| A company places an order to produce some gizmo through a
| Japanese firm. The order states what is could be "up to three
| non-working gizmos per one hundred in the final shipment".
| The order is completed, the employee comes to get it, sees a
| big packed boxes and a small one. He asks "what's in the big
| boxes?" and receives "That's your one hundred gizmos, like
| you ordered". He asks again "But what is in this small box
| there?" and receives "That's your three non-working gizmos,
| like you ordered".
| pezezin wrote:
| > It's a running joke at this point, because Japanese cannot
| compromise quality to make costs reasonable.
|
| As someone living in Japan, I don't buy this argument. There
| are plenty of shoddy Japanese products, number one being the
| houses (but I guess that is not something that you can
| export).
|
| > I'm not going to bother getting into how Japanese are
| horrible with software too.
|
| Here I fully agree. Anybody who has to suffer the software
| and web services made in here knows how bad it can be.
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| Cars and game consoles kinda disagree with you. For example,
| Mazda (now exclusively built in Japan) is a fair compromise
| between quality and cost.
|
| About software, I don't know. They seem to be very decent as
| far as research and embedded goes, even a bit of open source
| (I can cite https://github.com/guicho271828,
| https://github.com/fukamachi and https://github.com/cxxxr on
| the top of my head), but consumer software appears to be
| another story. I don't think it's for this reason, though.
|
| I can even remember them having a strong affinity with
| Prolog... ah, there's the link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki
| /Fifth_Generation_Computer_Syst...
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| > How about the US and MS ruining everything as usual?
|
| My personal theory is that MS set the human race back at least
| 20 years. YMMV.
| agumonkey wrote:
| How would your alternate timeline look, genuinely curious.
| Sometimes I fear that the current one looks mediocre but if
| you took another path it would have been worse for random
| reasons.
| ghaff wrote:
| Given the independent software vendor model, you were going
| to end up with a very small number of mass market operating
| systems/platforms one way or the other. It was certainly
| happening in the large commercial computer system space. In
| fact, the somewhat surprise is that Microsoft didn't become
| even _more_ dominant. A lot of people certainly expected it
| to.
| agumonkey wrote:
| potential demo of BTRON
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYfoCe6q28A
| initramfs wrote:
| https://j-core.org/
|
| "What is this processor? The SuperH processor is a Japanese
| design developed by Hitachi in the late 1990's. As a second
| generation hybrid RISC design it was easier for compilers to
| generate good code for than earlier RISC chips, and it recaptured
| much of the code density of earlier CISC designs by using fixed
| length 16 bit instructions (with 32 bit register size and address
| space), using microcoding to allow some instructions to perform
| multiple clock cycles of work. (Earlier pure risc designs used
| one instruction per clock cycle even when that served no purpose
| but to make the code bigger and exhaust the encoding space.)
|
| Hitachi developed 4 generations of SuperH. SH2 made it to the
| United states in the Sega Saturn game console, and SH4 powered
| the Sega Dreamcast. They were also widely used in areas outside
| the US cosumer market, such as the japanese automative industry.
|
| But during the height of SuperH's development, the 1997 asian
| economic crisis caused Hitachi to tighten its belt, eventually
| partnering with Mitsubishi to spin off its microprocessor
| division into a new company called "Renesas". This new company
| did not inherit the Hitachi engineers who had designed SuperH,
| and Renesas' own attempts at further development on SuperH didn't
| even interest enough customers for the result to go ito
| production. Eventually Renesas moved on to new designs it had
| developed entirely in-house, and SuperH receded in importance to
| them... until the patents expired."
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Interesting point of history-- the H8 processor is the MCU that
| powers the original Lego Mindstorms RCX. In high school I wrote
| some assembly language for it when making a robot that ran on
| BrickOS:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrickOS
| kn100 wrote:
| a slightly different (but close enough) Hitachi CPU also
| powered the Cybiko - a wacky games console few have heard of.
| I tried writing a disassembler for that particular cpu a
| while back. Was an interesting platform and oh man the
| documentation at least to me was gorgeous:
| github.com/kn100/cybemu/
| dagmx wrote:
| Link to the cybiko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybiko
|
| That is a really wild design
| phs318u wrote:
| Love it!
|
| "The concept for the device emerged from social research
| conducted in six countries, which identified a need for
| digital communication among youth. ... a radio protocol
| was patented. This protocol allowed up to 3,000 Cybiko
| devices to form a network without using auxiliary
| stations."
|
| Fascinating!
| cpach wrote:
| Wow. That's basically a smartphone!? Just way ahead of
| its time.
| hfgjbcgjbvg wrote:
| Apple might as well do this and cut out the carriers.
| xattt wrote:
| Is this what the Thread radios in all Apple devices are
| hiding?
| teruakohatu wrote:
| Sadly Thread is 2.4ghz rather than the much lower and
| longer range Lora frequencies. It's designed to be used
| within the home and between homes.
| asveikau wrote:
| Sounds a bit like LoRa.
| ruined wrote:
| it's the same 900MHz band
| samatman wrote:
| More interesting than a smartphone in some ways.
|
| Smartphones _can_ form mesh networks with WiFi, but
| neither of the duopoly OSes have this as a built-in
| feature, it 's left to apps, and that fragments the
| potential. The most powerful radio isn't user-
| controllable, it's strictly pay-to-play and operating a
| base station is heavily licensed, no peer-to-peer
| activity is possible.
|
| This is something I'd like to see disrupted, although I'm
| not holding my breath. I don't like that grid failure or
| (more likely) government order can knock smartphones off
| the network so easily as they can.
| Fnoord wrote:
| Back in the days (very early 2000s), Amsterdam got WLAN
| network called Wireless Oost. This gave people in
| Amsterdam Oost wireless internet access throughout the
| neighborhood, without needing cable internet from A2000
| (later merged with Chello, who merged with UPC, who
| merged with Ziggo, all the time owned by a certain
| company known as Liberty Global (you might have heard of
| them)). It also served as a (W)LAN. Back then, the local
| computer club ASCII (comprised of political activists and
| such, predecessor of the hackerspaces) had a cargo bike
| called Bakscii (derived from Dutch world of cargo bike
| (bakfiets) and ASCII). This provided WLAN access at
| demonstrations and such. It was a neat project which
| Internet Archive likely still holds.
|
| I was never directly involved with said project, btw, but
| I knew all of the people who were. Nowadays, I live near
| Amsterdam and will get 1 gbit symmetric fiber internet
| soon (most of NL already has access to it). I use a
| Wireguard tunnel to connect via any network (LTE/NG/WLAN)
| via my home network which runs Pi-Hole. My point being,
| security has improved, but there is a constant: wireless
| internet usage can be triangulated, eavesdropped, and
| clients can be tracked. It is something we need to live
| with. Every time I leave my smartphone at home even for
| something as small as picking up my kids at school or
| sports I feel good. However I can easily be tracked by
| all the doorbell cameras in the street.
|
| We are done with subversion on the internet. It is over,
| a done deal. I've given up many years ago, and eventually
| I also embraced the thought of such. If you want some
| private time together go to some cave in Turkey or
| whatever.
| xattt wrote:
| It only needed a school population geeky enough to have
| Cybikos. I wanted one, but no one else in middle school
| had one!
| Fnoord wrote:
| I mean, it was not a smartphone but a PDA and it ran
| Linux: Sharp Zaurus. I owned a CL1000 (later on I went to
| Nokia N810, though in hindsight the N800 was just as cool
| with dual SD). Magnificent devices, and back then I liked
| they didn't have GPRS or 3G. Such was slow anyway (and
| expensive connection) so I felt that saved me money.
| Besides, the WWW was dominated by MSIE. And no GSM meant
| to me less tracking.
| immibis wrote:
| My CASIO graphics calculator from high school also uses a
| SuperH.
| voidbert wrote:
| And interestingly for a graphing calculator, it lacks an
| FPU, and all floating point math has to be done in
| software.
| epcoa wrote:
| Not particularly unique at all. Handheld graphing
| calculators typically were not intended for use where
| hardware floating point was necessary. TI calculators
| historically used the Z80, no FPU. Earlier HP calculators
| did use a custom BCD based (not IEEE954) floating point
| ISA, but these are still slower than just about any
| processor in the past 30 years doing software floating
| point. They didn't have any hardware multiply or divide
| for one, this is not an FPU in the modern sense people
| envision. And later on the HP used common ARMv5 based
| processors with emulation. None of these ARM processors
| had hardware floating point. Same with later TI
| calculators that were 68k and then ARM based.
|
| The HP Prime G2 released in 2018 is about the only
| mainstream device that happens to have hardware FP, and
| that's for a device more touted for CAS features. The FPU
| is more just something that comes for free with the
| commodity SoC chosen.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > None of these ARM processors had hardware floating
| point
|
| More importantly, IEEE 754 floating point ISA is not
| great for calculators - they don't require the speed a
| personal computer does, and calculators work hard to hide
| the fact numbers such as 0.45 can't be represented as
| IEEE 754 floats.
| immibis wrote:
| It uses decimal floating point, so that's no worry.
| chaosite wrote:
| In popular culture, the Hitachi H8 microprocessor was
| referenced in the song Space Dementia by Muse.
|
| > Q - "What does "H Eight" mean?"
|
| > Matt [Bellamy]: Using a microcomputer (Hitachi H8 / 3048F)
| which can be built into the industrialmachines, you can learn
| and understand the inputs /outputs of the microcomputer as a
| basis of robot control and conduct theexperiments by
| C-language for steppingmotor control, servomotor control (PWM
| control) and serial communication. H8 model, a 16-bit
| microcomputer consists of 32-bit registers, has a flash ROM
| of 128KB, a RAM of 4KB (SRAM) with external extension of
| 128KB and 78 I/O terminals with the built-in A/D and
| D/Aconverters. H8 is a microcomputer usually built into a TV,
| VTR, mobile-phone and car navigator. Since it has ample I/O
| terminals, H8 microcomputer is also used as a brain of a
| small robot.
|
| [0] - https://web.archive.org/web/20160406073458/https://www.
| micro...
| sspiff wrote:
| I had a SuperH 3 powered HP Jornada that I ran Linux and NetBSD
| on back in the day. Not particularly fast, but power efficiency
| was off the charts, even when compared to the many contemporary
| ARM and MIPS based devices of the time.
|
| Or at least that's how my nostalgic memories think of it.
|
| It was really fun to have a pocketable laptop back in those
| days for me (baggy pants required). Good times.
| wslh wrote:
| I would love to see a modern device with a similar form
| factor to the classic PDAs. After some searching, I found a
| few options, but none of them are quite the same. Here's what
| I came across [1], [2], and potentially [3]. Does anyone know
| of other devices that come closer to the original clamshell
| PDA design?
|
| [1] https://www.gpd.hk/gpdpocket
|
| [2] https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/astro-slide
|
| [3]
| https://pine64.org/documentation/Phone_Accessories/Keyboard/
| tm0 wrote:
| Though about six years old, the Gemini PDA (from the same
| folks who make the Astro Slide) is likely the most modern
| device with the classic clamshell PDA form factor.
|
| https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/gemini-pda-wifi-only
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_TybtULQVo (interview with
| the designer, who was also one of the designers for the
| Psion PDA)
|
| If you are allowing a bit more modernity, they have the
| Cosmo Communicator, which has a screen on the outside.
|
| https://store.planetcom.co.uk/collections/devices/products/
| c...
| RajT88 wrote:
| I have owned both the astro slide and the Gemini PDA.
|
| Gemini is great: get one. Astro slide not so much.
| hulitu wrote:
| > spin off its microprocessor division into a new company
| called "Renesas". This new company did not inherit the Hitachi
| engineers who had designed SuperH
|
| This explaines why Renesas' products are so bad and why the
| datasheets are terrible.
| joezydeco wrote:
| I tried to evaluate their intro Linux processor (RZ/A) a
| while back and the amount of support we got from the factory
| was dismal. I got an FAE to confess that the two factions
| (Hitachi vs NEC) didn't get along. They have a bread-and-
| butter product line in the RL78 but we dropped the idea of
| using them for anything else.
| publicmail wrote:
| The ECU in my 350z also used a SuperH CPU - I think SH2?
| asveikau wrote:
| > developed by Hitachi in the late 1990's.
|
| I remember hearing about SuperH in the early 90s. Wikipedia
| says 1992.
|
| > in the Sega Saturn game console,
|
| Wasn't that around 1995? Already too early for "late" 1990s.
| giantrobot wrote:
| The Saturn development was started around 1992 and was
| released in Japan in 1994.
| farmdve wrote:
| I have done extensive reverse engineering of SH2 firmwares, at
| first I didn't like it, but then found it elegant.
| RajT88 wrote:
| As an aside my recent trip to Japan, I hit up all the crazy
| gaming stores hoping to find an FM Towns or the even more rare FM
| Towns Marty.
|
| They looked at me like I was a three headed monkey.
| mappu wrote:
| I looked around too - Mandarake only had popular consoles;
| Super Potato in Akihabara and Retro TV Game Revival in Osaka
| had MSX, but no FM Towns. The store clerk read my enquiry off
| Google Translate on my phone and gave me a one-word reply: iie.
|
| It probably takes local expertise to find one in someone's
| attic. Playing its Lupin III exclusive game might have to
| remain a MAME job.
| pezezin wrote:
| If you are looking for retrocomputers in Akihabara, the place
| to visit is BEEP. It is the only shops that specializes in
| that kind of stuff.
| Tiktaalik wrote:
| I did see some old PCs of that sort at Hard-off further afield.
| I don't recall where. May have been in the burbs around Osaka.
|
| In Tokyo the easily accessible source to have a peek at some
| computers like this is BEEP in Akihabara.
|
| Edit: Yep looking through my photos I saw an FM Towns Marty at
| a Hard Off in Kanazawa. Y=49500.
|
| Saw an actual FM Towns at a Hard off in Hachioji. More Y=77000
| when you combine the monitor and computer.
|
| That last big Eco Town in Hachioji was quite the old PC source.
| Also had a PC 98 and boxed (!) X68000.
| RajT88 wrote:
| > Y=49500
|
| At current exchange rate, that is a steal! Kanazawa is...
| Sadly not typically a place you go if you're on a brief visit
| of a couple weeks.
|
| When I was studying abroad in 2001, I saw an original FM
| Towns tower case basically in the junk pile. I wanted it even
| then for how distinctive it was, but had no clue what it was.
| What might have been!
| Findecanor wrote:
| I think a better chance of finding anything vintage would be
| Yahoo! Auctions and if you're not living there: a proxy-
| shipping service such as Buyee.jp.
|
| BTW. My Holy Grails as a vintage keyboard collector are
| ergonomic keyboards with columnar layout for the PC88 and PC98
| computers ... or a B-TRON keyboard.
| unixhero wrote:
| I know where they have one.
|
| BEEP in Akihabara. I played some games on it. Definitely great.
| tantalor wrote:
| This would be much more comprehensible if the author would
| include some dates.
| fnord77 wrote:
| sadly, no pics. The FM Towns was kinda cool looking
| nisten wrote:
| they got old
| pyeri wrote:
| Anyone remembers Toshiba laptops? Their build quality was top-
| notch and they were quite durable at the price point they came.
| Then around 2012-14, they started disappearing from the market,
| what happened to them?
| lifeformed wrote:
| They rebranded to Dynabook I think?
| pyeri wrote:
| Just Googled and came to know they sold their stake in PC
| division to another Japanese company called Sharp in 2018,
| this Sharp then later rebranded as Dynabook. But it no longer
| has the same traction as original Toshiba, nor is it
| available on most online ecommerce stores.
| rvba wrote:
| Can someone with a background in marketing explain why so
| many companies drop their recognizable brand names and
| start using other names, which have lower market
| penetation?
|
| My theory is either mergers/spinoffs.. or someone in
| markering wants to get a bonus, so they kill the brand.
|
| Someone at blizzard wanted to rename battle.net to blizzard
| app for example
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a lot Of reasons, often not good ones, but it's
| often the case that the existing brand doesn't really
| represent what the company does any longer or is too
| narrow.
|
| Of course it may just be a marketing VP who wants a
| prestige project on their resume.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| They were always called Dynabooks by Toshiba[1] and still
| continue to be sold today, but they retreated to only selling
| in Japan a long time ago and Toshiba ultimately sold the
| Dynabook brand off to Sharp in 2018 as part of selling off
| most of their businesses to avoid bankruptcy.
|
| For those who aren't aware, Toshiba is the quintessential
| example of Japanese Exceptionalising Into Failure(tm)[2].
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynabook_Inc.
|
| [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fujio_Masuoka
| Tor3 wrote:
| I still have a Toshiba Dynabook lying around. Big and
| heavy, but otherwise a fine laptop.
| dunghill wrote:
| Got a Dynabook too. It's a tank.
| kossTKR wrote:
| There was also the Sony Vaio Laptop line that i remember as
| being quite a good product?
|
| But yeah they all seemed to die out.
| hinkley wrote:
| Fujitsu lifebook. Smallest laptop with a removable CDROM
| drive.
| agumonkey wrote:
| On a different niche Panasonic with their toughbooks secured a
| solid spot.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| For me, the MacBook Air happened.
|
| My progression was Toshiba Satellite in 1999 and 2002, then HP
| business line laptop in 2005 and 2008, and then once I tried
| MacBook Air and I could close the lid without worrying the
| laptop would stay on and overheat in my backpack, I never went
| back to Windows. Plus it was lightweight and the battery was
| the most long lasting.
|
| I am guessing businesses using Windows used mostly
| HP/Dell/Lenovo business line computers because they had
| extensive same day/next day on site support, so the business
| Windows market went to them, and lots of personal laptop market
| went to MacBook Air, leaving an untenable smaller, low margin
| market for non HP/Dell/Lenovo companies.
|
| And then some of that went to smartphones/tablets too. And
| after SSDs hit the market, technological advancement slowed so
| a new laptop was not that much better than an old laptop, so
| you could keep using it for 5+ years easy. I typed this on a
| 2015 Air.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| I am not picking on you in particular but want to bring a
| general point up to readers:
|
| Why is it I always read the parent opinion when it comes to
| laptop shopping, but never the opposite (which is mine):
|
| -Bigger -> better
|
| -Thicker -> better
|
| -Terrible battery life
|
| -Desktop CPU and GPU
|
| -Blow torch thermal exhaust
|
| -Maximum storage and RAM
|
| All so I can run lm-studio, having Llama 3 pump out my edgy
| 4chan shitposts and effortposts for me, within the absolute
| comfiness of Qubes OS. I couldn't imagine relying on
| something thin and low powered unless it did very specific
| things (and, if it can't run Qubes, then it stays offline).
| fragmede wrote:
| Because what you've described isn't a laptop but a shitty
| desktop computer. Laptops that large are heavy, which sucks
| to travel with. Such a monstrosity isn't convenient to
| throw into your bag and bring with you everywhere all day.
| If you're not even using it for graphics, get a desktop,
| install Tailscale, and remote in for your shitposts.
|
| Is the opinion, anyway. Nothing wrong with your opinion (or
| mine), they're just opinions after all, but if I was on my
| feet all day in the field and needed a laptop, I'd rather
| something small and light with a long battery life. If I
| wanted something luggable, I'd go for a usb-c monitor and
| as small a desktop chassis as would fit a proper GPU inside
| of a mobile one. But dealing with the cables for that would
| get old real quick, so a laptop like you describe would be
| my pick in those circumstances. Eg my friend's a VJ and
| performs at random clubs and a gaming laptop like you
| described is the most appropriate device.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Because the magnitude of demand similar to yours is so low,
| that I doubt many manufacturers can exist profitably in
| that space, hence Toshiba and others exiting the market.
| underlipton wrote:
| Having worked at an electronics retailer, I can tell you that
| "lots" is doing some heavy-lifting in terms of characterizing
| how much of the laptop market is taken up by Macbooks, let
| alone the Air, specifically. Certainly, many college students
| wouldn't be caught dead with a Windows computer, but most
| people were happy to walk out with something half the price
| of a Mac, particularly when they're far more used to Windows
| at school and work than OS X. Acer and Asus were beginning to
| take up a decent portion of our sales by the time I left.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| MacBook Airs are cheap, in my opinion. I spent $900 on mine
| 9 years ago. The amortized cost over its lifetime is very
| competitive with even the cheapest Windows laptops.
|
| Even now, an M3 13in with 16GB ram and 512GB SSD is only
| $1,300. An M3 13in with 8GB ram and 256GB SSD is $900, and
| that would be good enough for 90% of people for 5+ years
| easy.
|
| https://www.costco.com/macbook-air-laptop-13-inch---
| apple-m3...
| underlipton wrote:
| And (what to most consumers seems like) an equivalent
| Windows machine can be had for less than half that. After
| 2.5 years, you can upgrade. This argument has been had ad
| nauseum; it's not interesting anymore. I just wanted to
| point out what seemed like a mistake in your analysis re:
| sales. If you'd like to discuss that, that's fine.
| Razengan wrote:
| In a YouTube video about the history of OS/2, I learned that ole
| Microsoft back in the 1990s before their mob tactics were
| curtailed, used to send suited thugs to Japanese PC manufacturers
| to chastise them for even offering users the mere _option_ of
| buying PCs with OS /2 instead of Windows..
|
| Could such practices have stifled the innovation and growth
| within the Japanese PC industry?
|
| They did have some takes of their own on the PC platform with
| that unique Japanese flavor, in series like the PC-8800/PC-98, FM
| Towns, etc.:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-8800_series
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-98
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns
|
| Who knows what more they could've done if Windows 95 hadn't
| smothered everything under the sun? Like the ill-deserved demise
| of the Commodore Amiga, this seems like a failure of politics
| than merit.
| FMecha wrote:
| >In a YouTube video about the history of OS/2, I learned that
| ole Microsoft back in the 1990s before their mob tactics were
| curtailed, used to send suited thugs to Japanese PC
| manufacturers to chastise them for even offering users the mere
| option of buying PCs with OS/2 instead of Windows..
|
| That, out of context, gives an impression-implication of
| Microsoft's Japanese operations having ties with the yakuza.
|
| And for PC-98 and FM Towns, versions of Windows were available
| for them (with FM Towns' uniqueness diminishing gradually as
| Fujitsu embraced DOS/V).
| JSR_FDED wrote:
| I remember working in Taiwan in the late nineties and noticed
| that the PE2 editor for MSDOS was incredibly popular, because you
| could easily define macros that mapped to multi-character
| sequences, which combined with a BIOS that had character tables
| for simplified Chinese meant you could generate Chinese text
| without too much difficulty. To this day my vimrc has some of
| those PE2 macros :-)
| amelius wrote:
| > The thing about DOS is that it's a much thinner OS than what we
| think of in 2024. When you're writing DOS software of any kind of
| complexity, you're talking straight to the hardware, or to
| drivers that are specific to particular classes of hardware.
|
| How is that different from how we access our GPUs nowadays?
| bitmasher9 wrote:
| Today we access GPUs through standard APIs like DirectX, CUDA,
| OpenGL etc. In DOS there wasn't these standards, and you had to
| write code for specific hardware.
| amelius wrote:
| True, but our OS has no idea what processes run on which GPU,
| or how much GPU memory they use. Everything on the GPU
| happens behind the back of the OS.
| TazeTSchnitzel wrote:
| That's not true, the kernel driver knows what page mappings
| belong to particular processes, including GPU page
| mappings. Moreover, you have no choice but to talk to that
| kernel driver; you can't go behind its back and talk
| _truly_ directly to the GPU, even if you bypass the
| userspace GPU driver, because this would allow
| circumventing memory protection. It is true, however, that
| modern GPU kernel drivers are relatively thin.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| I guess Unicode happened?
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| The MSX in Japan had a Japanese character set. Was this good
| enough for mainstream word processing needs?
|
| Really curious to know!
|
| PS: I mean letters, essays, etc - not DTP.
| phonon wrote:
| https://www.msx.org/wiki/Category:Japanese_Word_Processors
| pnw wrote:
| Some of the Japanese PC platforms were sold in Australia. Shout-
| out to the Hitachi Peach, a curious 6809 machine reminiscent of
| an Apple II. My high school friends father purchased one (it was
| cheaper than an actual PC) and we spent many weekends coding on
| it but it was very difficult to find much info beyond the manual.
| IIRC it had Microsoft Basic but a proprietary OS. Parts of the
| manual were still in Japanese. It all seemed so exotic at the
| time.
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