It's easy to look backwards by a quarter century plus, on "Fifth generation computing" as a failure, but a lot of interesting and durable stuff came out of it (if not the "fifth generation computer"). The Japanese large-system peripherals of the late 80's and early 90's really cleaned the clocks of any competitors, not just the reliability of the electromechanical transports, but in large part because of signal processing done in NEC/Fujitsu/Hitachi/Toshiba signal processing chains. Tim.