31 Oct
2005
31 Oct
'05
8:05 a.m.
On Oct 29, 2005, at 9:08 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
The problem of display (using 1970's technology)
is more thorny.
Kanji
symbols are quite complex and detailed, requiring very good video
displays
and character generation. Printing presents its own issues.
While the US
and Europe was quite happy with 9-pin dot matrix printheads, the
Japanese
of necessity introduced 18 and 22 wire printheads to deal with the
problem
of Kanji character generation. Daisy-wheel technology was clearly
not an
alternative!
I've seen a Japanese typewriter... quite a beast!
FWIW. The early NEC PC9801 was very much like the IBM PC of the time,
but with some strange omissions/changes in the BIOS (which, when
disassembled had a marked similarity to the IBM PC BIOS), like
routines for displaying characters. Instead they had a 16 bit VRAM
that you wrote to directly... and you could do some really
interesting things in that space, like doing simple character
animations etc.
The one Japanese machine I'd love to get my hands on would be one of
the 5th generation computing projects prolog machines... the Japanese
response to Symbolics LISP machines (Symbolics ended up belonging to
Shin Nitetsu or somesuch from memory). There was a purple one that
NEC made (I think), about the size of Sun E250.