If you are a retrocomputer person, at least in North America and Europe, you probably only have a hazy idea of what computers were in the Japanese market at the time we were all buying MSDOS-based computers. You may have heard of PC-98, but there were many Japanese-only computers out there, and a recent post by [Misty De Meo] asks the question: What happened to the Japanese computers?
To answer that question, you need a history lesson on PC-98 (NEC), FM Towns (Fujitsu), and the X68000 (Sharp). The PC-98 was originally a text-only MSDOS-based computer. But eventually, Microsoft and NEC ported Windows to the machine.
The FM Towns had its own GUI operating system. However, it too had a Windows port and the machine became just another Windows platform. The X68000, as you may well have guessed, used a 68000 CPU. Arguably, this was a great choice at the time. However, history shows that it didn’t work out, and when Sharp began making x86-based Windows machines — and, of course, they did — there was no migration path.
[Misty] makes an interesting point. While we often think of software like Microsoft Office as driving Windows adoption, that wasn’t the case in Japan. It turns out that multitasking was the key feature since Office, at the time, wasn’t very friendly to the native language.
So where did the Japanese computers go? The answer for two of them is: nowhere. They just morphed into commodity Windows computers. The 68000 was the exception — it just withered away.
Japanese pocket computers were common at one time and have an interesting backstory. Japanese can be a challenge for input but, of course, hackers are up to the challenge.
Still a lot of NEC PC98’s in old japanese cnc machine controls. Complete with their odd fd1135’s with vfo on the drive board not motherboard side like pc’s.
I have one about 12ft from me here in a Sodick bf275 wire edm, complete with gotek in place of the floppies. I’ve had to do some deep diving round the insides to achieve this, its been fun a weird retro way.
The CBUS system was equivalent to isa/pci in ibm pc’s, memory expansions on soldered boards that plug in with pin headers, and the aforementioned missing vfo for driving timing on the motherboard spring to mind as interesting divergences. The drive capacities themselves were odd in that the fd1135 3.5 floppy held 1.2MB and span slower so needed special modes in the hardware to work (3 mode) irrc so that 5.25 and 3.5 sd diskettes held the same capacities.
Later on pc982x onwards got dimm modules and daughterboards with x86 cpu etc. But the original PC980x series was the real oddball.
There’s some mad mystique round the real thing, but when I first got my Sodick and saw people asking $1000+ being asked for a replacement pc98, I bought 4 on aledo (yahoo japan) auctions from office clearouts and had change from $150 for all four and all crammed with odd cbus cards, scsi controllers, memory expansion daughter cards etc. Shipping was almost the same again though…
we sold a few Hitachi Apricots, I swear that is what they were called
it was 6809 based, had sound, great graphics
I never saw any software for it, all you had was the built in basic
I remember programming a Wang comouter in BASIC, but not 100% sure if it was japanese
Wang was an American computer company, if that’s what you’re wondering. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Laboratories
I swear my neighbour’s dad had an Apricot portable, it was mono screen and mind blowing at the time.
“While we often think of software like Microsoft Office as driving Windows adoption”
Do we? Windows adoption was well underway on its own merits long before Microsoft Office was delivered. Folks were happily using Wordperfect and Lotus long before Word and Excel and were and it was quite a decent amount of time before they began to lose ground to Microsoft pricing and marketing pressures once Office became more commonplace, say between the releases of Win95 and Win98. Personally I credit Microsoft Works as ceitical to the eventual Microsoft Office success. As the home PC market grew, folks were less willing to shell out the extra cash for Wordperfect and Lotus, instead learning the Works package that came for free with Win 3.1. Familiarity with the Works applications at home made adoption of Microsoft Office easier once it became available in more corporate environments.
Personally, I think that MS Works was the better alternative sometimes.
At least for private users and small offices.
Works was more lightweight than Office and had a more friendly user interface.
As time went on, it became more and more complete while still staying true to itself.
I often think that Works had been taken down because it became a rival to Office.
When Vista was out, Office had adopted the ugly ribbon interface but not Works.
By that time, Works had looked much more professional and became a threat to Office.
To me, what made Windows 3.x an important piece of software was the availability of programming tools.
Windows 3.x had lots of shareware and freeware titles being written for.
It was the continuation of the era of the bedroom programmers.
With tools like Visual Basic, MS Quick C for Windows or Turbo Pascal for Windows it was possible to write applications in no time (esp. VB3 was overly popular).
Many independent developers in early 90s had tried their look developing shareware titles at home in the hope of starting a business eventually.
This concept isn’t too different from Japanese self-publishing.
Quite a few 18+ games had been sold that way. ;)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doujinshi
you might recheck your sources. Word and Excel predate widespread Windows adoption.
Word came in in 1983, was for DOS and Xenix.
Excel came out in 1985, was for DOS, and had a life on Mac.
Word-for-Windows (“winword”) came out in 1989, during the Windows 2.0 era. Windows adoption was poor at this time, and developers could link their DOS application with an embedded Windows runtime.
Windows came into market acceptance in 1990 with 3.0.
If anything, Word and Excel drove Windows adoption — it surely did in my office at the time.
I think bwmetz wasn’t wrong, from a 90s point-of-view.
In early 90s, Windows 3.1x and Works 2 were quite popular.
In comparison to MS Office bundle, at very least.
What’s also important, maybe: Windows 2 had little to offer to Windows applications, memory wise.
If conventional memory was running out, Windows applications had to use EMS on their own.
Best thing Windows/386 did was to offer EMS to all DOS/Windows through help of the 386 memory managment unit (MMU).
Windows 3.0 was different first time. It had three different kernals.
The Real-Mode kernal didn’t provide EMS, but use available for Windows.
For the very time, all Windows applications could retrieve large amount of memory through Windows API.
They nolonger had to support EMS manually.
This made legacy applications from the Windows 1.x and 2.x much more powerful.
With Standard-Mode kernal, Windows could use XMS memory and run advanced applications using OLE2, DDE and other Windows API features unavailable in Real-Mode kernal.
If Windows 3.0 ran 386 Enhanced Mode kernal, it could multitask DOS applications and use virtual memory (swap file).
It also could run 32-Bit applications compiled with Watcom’s Win386 extender.
In this respect, it was understandable that Windows 3.0 was a success.
It allowed using more memory and larger applications.
WinWord and Excel on Windows 2.x were a start, but barely usable without EMS memory.
And here, all the 8086 and 80286 owners had to use hardware-based EMS.
Either by installing an LIM4 or EEMS compatible expanded memory memory board or by having EMS provided by the chipset.
The 386 owners could use Windows/386, of course, but were better off with OS/2.
OS/2 had higher initial demands, but was supporting virtual memory and never ran out of memory on the long run.
Windows/386 was quick and small, but was quickly getting choppy once conventional memory ran out.
Anyway, just saying. Personally, I think it wasn’t WinWord or Excel which made Windows popular.
It rather was Windows 3 which provided an environment in which
applications ran without encountering limits all the time. Or so I think.
GeoWorks Ensemble was similar to Windows 3 and even had an sophisticated MS Office counterpart included for free.
Why didn’t it become a big success? Missing third-party support.
That’s what Microsoft did do right with Windows 3.
The SDK and an modern IDE in the form of Visual Basic 1.0 were available right from start.
kernel
That was way more detail than I could have remembered or offered, but hits the point I was loosely trying to make. In my admittedly limited experience during that era, it was Win3.0, 3.1 and 3.11 for workgroups that sold themselves. Office was simply icing on the cake after win95 became so popular; Office97 being what I consider the first real winner in that software line.
I agree with you on the Works threat to Office sales as well. Early versions were more than capable and thr databse support, while limited, was arguably easier to learn and use than the Office version of that era [too bad they didn’t convert easily iirc]. While later versions of Works gained.improved look and feel, it seemed obvious at the time that nee features were not being added as a way to encourage “upgrades” to Office.
I remember WordStar, WordPerfect and Word for Windows when they first came out. Al of them were pretty bad. Getting a General Protection Fault and having them program close with loss of work was pretty common with all three. For quite a few years I used WordPerfect for DOS because it had a great macro language which allowed automation of complex tasks. Also printer support for DOS WordPerfect was much better than Windows at the time.
Microsoft persevered and eventually Word for Windows no longer GPF’ed randomly after about the third iteration. I know they’re supposed to use a clean-room approach where the Microsoft software developers write to the APIs without talking to the people writing the operating system, but there is an undeniable synergy by having both Windows and Word come from the same company. Having broad printer support since about the time of Windows XP was a big step forward.
“…on its own merits…” invites some serious and entertainingly heated debate about how much of that “merit” really WAS MicroSoft’s “own”, and how much was… hmm, let’s see… Xerox, by way of Apple, by way of Japan, by way of near-useless anti-trust law, etc, etc, etc…
Uhh, while the FM Towns got a windows port, that platform was absolutely bot “just another windows machine”. In fact underlying the entire system was a DOS/V OS booting off of ROM and CD-ROM, even before the hard drive had a chance to load.
When Windows was brought around to the scene, it was a very difficult migration, requiring a hard drive (non-standard on any of the machines) and a 486 (leaving most of the platform eating the dust from all but the top end newest units). That’s not even talking about the RAM situation, which on an FM Towns, if you add more, the system becomes unstable and games start to have trouble.
No, the Towns was its own thing for a very very long time, much like the X68000, and windows penetration was pretty rare.
The Sharp X68000 wasn’t a “PC”, also. It was more of a small graphics workstation.
The high-end models had an 68030 processor, even.
The X68k was often being used in game development, too.
Both for developing games for arcade cabs, which were 68000-based often and as a graphic workstation in general.
It was very sophisticated for its time, really.
That’s why it was very beloved by a small community, understandably.
To give an idea: In the 80s, it already had a very advanced standbye mode, for example.
You could press the power/standby button and it would save applications and turn off monitor.
If you pressed it again, it would restore the previous session exactly as you left it.
All the windows, for example, opened up again as they were before.
You’re forgetting MSX! I have dozens of Japanese MSX computers, and 12 of them are bright red!
Don’t take it too seriously. The article linked to isn’t complete, either.
For example, NEC and Microsoft didn’t team up in 1992 first time, but maybe much earlier already.
There’s a NEC PC-9801 version of Windows 2, at least, which is an evidence.
https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows/386_2.03_(NEC_PC-9800_OEM)
Secondly, MSX.. MSX is related to Microsoft and DOS (Z80 version) but always had the reputation of being on C64 level, of being a a home computer standard.
It wasn’t taken seriously, initially.
And with MSX1 I can understand it. Very poor. Parodius and Artic Mission excluded.
(Gratefully, many MSX1 machines have a newer VDP and can be converted to near MSX2).
MSX2, MSX2+ and TurboR were much more capable, though.
These platforms used 3,5″ floppy disks as the main medium and had fine game titles such as Snatcher.
Many games were available on PC-88, PC-98, x68k and MSX2 simultanously.
A very interesting oddity was an IBM PC compatible with both CGA and MSX2 graphics (superimposed).
It could have been a hit, if the design had been adopted by others.
It even had the PSG of MSX, in addition to PC-Speaker.
https://www.msx.org/wiki/Spectravideo_SVI-838
https://www.rigpix.com/vcomp/spectravideo_svi838xpress16.htm
http://msxbanzai.tni.nl/curiosity.html
A handful of DOS games had been been optimized with MSX2 graphics.
For Example: Perry Mason: The Case of the Mandarin Murder
https://www.mobygames.com/game/1196/perry-mason-the-case-of-the-mandarin-murder/screenshots/
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjeq24_QNVk
Tip: When the 8088 is being replaced by a V20, an XT becomes almost 80286 software compatible.
That’s good enough for many DOS applications from the 90s.
MS-DOS 6.2x can still run fine on an XT class computer.
Some later Norton utilities may want to see an 80286 (or V20 or V30), though.
Well Nintendo still makes non x86
And risc based computers
After using cisc 6502 instead of x86
Video game console is literally a computer
Application specific computer
If you run custom bootloader then it’s just as capable as any other personal computer
Just port the nt Kernel and run Windows
I recall the NEC APC III. There was an on-board 7220 graphics accelerator and the APC could do much higher resolution graphics than most other IBM PC clones of the time. The problem was that there wasn’t much software for it here in the US. If you wanted to run windows, you have to buy a co-processor board called the SLE, and SLE was almost as expensive as buying a cheap PC clone with a Hercules display card from a Computer Shopper vendor.
I don’t remember the software title, but there was a decent word processor program which used the APC III graphics capabilities and I knew someone who kept using an APC III for quite a while after Windows started to become popular.
How could you forget late 80s Yamaha with a Z80. Sound and sprites for graphical gaming was out of this world compared to anything PC based
https://es.yamaha.com/es/products/contents/proaudio/training_support/micro_tutorial/20180329/index.html