24 May
2012
24 May
'12
5:57 p.m.
Back in the bad old days of microprocessors, the company I worked for
teamed up with Mitsui to see if we could market our system in Japan.
Initially we came out with a machine that used Katakana for input and
output. While it was simple to do (basically a change in keyboard
layouts and fonts), it was far from satisfactory for the Japanese
market. So we were tasked with supplying a simplified Kanji version
(about 6,000 Kanji or so). CRT output using big font ROMs was
discussed, but input was a big problem.
I think somewhere I still have some of the marketing material for
some early Japanese wapros. I was impressed with, I think, the
system used by Fujitsu. The user selected a base symbol then added
elements to it and the system displayed a menu of possibilities and
refined things from there. I'll have to dig around and refresh my
memory. We never got to the prototype stage on any of this.
Thai, on the other hand, was fairly simple.
After studying character formation and structure, it's obvious why 21-
wire dot-matrix print heads originated in Japan, while the west was
still using 9-wire models.
--Chuck