Japanese computers

On 10/29/2005 at 7:53 PM Sridhar Ayengar wrote: There IS an aspect of Japanese micros that I dabbled in for a while back in the early 80's. That dealt with the problem of supporting the Kanji character set on 8 bit systems. Initially, the Japanese made do with the Katakana alphabet, which is a simplified phonetic system and not ideographic as is Kanji. However, Katakana (and Hiragana) characters are usually used only for foreign words in Japanese and are not considered the normal way to write. (As an interesting aside, Hiragana is generally held to have been developed by women, where Katakana being more angular is held to have been developed by men.) We tend to take public literacy for granted here in the West, but in Japan, public education (at least as far as teaching Kanji reading and writing) didn't begin until after WW II. There are two problems to overcome in dealing with the several (7,000-9,000) Kanji used in everyday literate Japanese. The first is character entry and the second is character display. Obviously a 7,000 key keyboard is out of the question. The most successful scheme was marketed by NEC in the 1970s and involves building up a character from its basic elements with the computer offering choices on an on-screen menu as alternatives are narrowed. 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! While we in the western world take for granted "universal" character encoding such as ASCII and EBCDIC, there were a number of competing systems in Japanese, such as DBCS and Shift-JIS. I've still got some product brochures and notes in my files that I assembled back in the early PC days on how the really tough problem of handling Japanese writing was handled. All of this should be taken with the grain of salt that my very fuzzy recollection deserves! Cheers, Chuck