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/

My CASIO graphics calculator from high school also uses a SuperH.

There was a SuperH in my parents' Panasonic TV - I found the GPL license and kernel info deep in the menu system.

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...

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/

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.

The Saturn development was started around 1992 and was released in Japan in 1994.

Oric was British.

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.

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,

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).

The X68k was an absolutely amazing line of machines. Beautiful industrial design in and out.

The FM Towns relied on Intel CPUs, but the rest of the hardware was designed more or less like any other Japanese system of the era with specialized graphics and sound hardware. I believe it also was capable of booting off of CDs and running the software directly without having to install anything to an internal hard drive.

The specifications of the graphics and sound hardware were bleeding edge for sprite-based hardware of the time and included some really incredible graphics modes that far exceeded normal VGA plus had some really arcade level sprite hardware which the IBM-PC graphics hardware never offered.

The audio hardware was likewise well in excess of contemporary PC soundcards. It also mirrored arcade level hardware in capability.

In some ways, the FM Towns was as much a general purpose Personal Arcade as it was a Computer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_Towns

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

Fujitsu lifebook. Smallest laptop with a removable CDROM drive.

vaio brand got bought and reincarnated with very uninspiring lineup

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.

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...

> 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".

> 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.

My switch and midrange sony tv (which just turned ten years old, and is still “good enough”) seem like decent counterexamples.

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.

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.

> ¥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!

Nothing available mail order currently:

https://www.beep-shop.com/ec/products/list?category_id=705

Will keep an eye!

This is why DOS games that supported 3DFX just talked directly to the GPU. They documented all the registers mapping for direct access. Didn't even need to install drivers.

DOS was in its twilight years at that point, Nvidia/ATI didn't bother with DOS support so they just kept them behind OpenGL/DirectX.

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.

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.

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_Windows#... :

====

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.

====

[dead]

> 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.

Could you speak more to the US “opening the Japanese market when they really want to”? I’m not familiar with this.

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.

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.

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.

thanks internet autism

Was this the place?

bug.co.jp

Apparently they changed their name last year.

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.

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.

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."

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

Someone posted this link on HN a short while ago

https://www.tldw.pro/

I tend to just listen to Asianometry as a podcast while resting or doing menial tasks at home.

Watch later

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.

there are many such sites if you just google for them