The Computer Chronicles - Japanese PCs (1984) 

Mr. Nishi was born on February 10, 1956 and founded his own company in 1977. Impressive. At the time this was filmed, he would have been 29 (possibly 28). August 6, 2022 4:56 am

@@whattheheck1000 , he is launching a "new" platform, MSX3. He will be in Barcelona at the end of this month.

@@ostrogonov Awesome just checked it out. I wonder if it's related to the older MSX hardware.

@@alexpetrovich85from what i could tell the msx3 is a single chip version upgrade of msx2/msx with expandability options for things like blu-Ray, drives, etc. it’s like a really compact version of that msx specialized machine

Unbelievable...

Lol, I was thinking about the same Marty McFly quote while watching.

@Andrew Tarrant Lmao... Get a load of this guy. Home of the counterfeits and masters of breach of contracts.

@Andrew Tarrant in our country there are a lot of electronic market that selling old japan things like fridge, air conditioner,. . . but none of place that sell chinese old tech, even the new one

You forgot the weirder stuff too

Hearing him say that really lifted my spirits. They were like, we could copy IBM all day long but if we don't progress the technology then what is the point. Love that

I was renting laserdisc movies in 1986.

@ungratefulmetalpansy You can definitely see the transition from floppy to CD with that lever. lol

What?! We had CD ROM here in the late 1980's. I can tell you a very famous case...the TG-16 CD ROM ROM. That was here in 1989. Alpine and Bose also sold car CD players as far back as 1987. They were ridiculously high-end but you could get one for your car. The real problem was finding music for it.

The biggest truth is how the Japanese don't invent new stuff. What they are great at is taking an existing product and improving on it. They didn't invent the portable tape player. But they took the big, bulky tape players of yesteryear, ripped out what wasn't needed and turned it into the Walkman. A device that revolutionized music and how we interact with it.

@@umachan9286 Americans invent new technology, the Japanese improve on it, the Chinese do a shitty copy of it that no one asked for but everyone still buys. Awaiting angry replies.

@SteelRodent Yep, that is the biggest problem right there. The feedback loop of dumping a cheap product that barely meets spec on the market and people sorting by cheapest on their shopping app of choice. It does not help that also on one side there are corporations that have a desire to keep costs as low as possible at the expense of quality and on the other side corporations that could care less about their overall image of export quality when they can take a barebones product and still manage to cut a few bits off here and there in a race to be the cheapest. As long as the money keeps flowing neither side has any incentive to change though.

Me 2!

@@umachan9286 that's exactly what Apple does, a US company taking (or buying out) others ideas, improve on it and sell it for a premium. And it seems people like that given Apples market value :-) It all starts with an idea and an technology. But the implementation is what makes or breaks it. Some companies (or countries for that matter) are good at that :-)

You're a bit off in some of those games. Final Fantasy on MSX2 was ported from the Famicom version. Gradius/Nemesis was an arcade game first, with the FC and MSX version coming out the year afterward in that order. Dracula was also released first on FCD, with the MSX2 version coming out shortly afterward (though that was a drastically different version made as a parallel project). And it was Metal Gear that was on MSX2, not Metal Gear Solid (pedantic I know, but the suffix makes the difference).

It did also very well in The Netherlands.

Peter Keijzer True, and i know a Peter Keijzer from Delden who had a MSX.... Could it be you?

MSX was very popular in Spain too.

America just never caught on!

But now, they're nowhere to be found... Except for Sony at the dining hall, Epson at a work desk and Canon at the hands of a photographer and that's it. They've seriously downgraded from where they actually were in the 80s. Sad!

​​​​​@@tanmoyeeghosh7180that's mainly because of Plaza Accord. They are still dominant in watches (Casio, citizen, Seiko), Calculators (Casio) and Cameras (Sony, canon, Nikon) they are still famous brands. And tyre industry (Bridgestone, Yokohama) etc and bike industry & Car industry

1500 for a triple cheese burger.

Anglophones invented it, of course. If the Japanese had wanted to, they could have just used Romaji (19 letters) instead of Kana and Kanji.

That´s precisely his point: they have English syntax because anglophones invented it, which means that Americans and British pioneered that field. On the other hand, English uses the Latin alphabet, which is way more widespread than Romaji, which makes it more accessible to non-native English speakers. I am not sure Romaji could have ever been very successful even if Japanese had invented any mainstream programming languages.

Their operating system choices were like "we'll roll our own, not compete with IBM PC compatibles"... Oof.

That was true of the grade school I went to in the mid 80's.

Christopher Sobieniak it's still is here

Rogeh Interesting. My high school had dozens and dozens in the mid 90's.

In Mongolia an average school in big cities used to have 2-3 pc's during 1987. Maybe by 1985 first coding courses for school children were opened. I first learned gw-basic in one of those courses.

I don't believe my school had any computers yet, but 3 years later, we probably had 8. We went to the "computer lab" (library back storage room) and took turns practicing cold booting and warm booting. We formed teams of 3 or 4 to "program" the turtle to move in a box. They had the air conditioning turned so cold, they sent a letter home to remind us to bring sweaters on computer days.

What do you mean US manufacturing is bad? It is miles ahead of the Chinese

@@jr2904 You must be in an alternate 2023. Come back and see!

That’s because the US and Europe don’t have economies geared around manufacturing anymore. There’s nothing wrong with that.

just hardware and everything else

They seem to have fear to innovate now. Innovation is not recreating the computer but neither did it Microsoft or Apple

I don't like him.

Yes especially some of the things mention to be either a success or a total flop.

+Jing Garcia Why I always see this kind of comment in every Computer Chronicles video I watched??

+Qweekskowped it's a line one of their sponsors used before the start of the show to try prevent people from pirating software. i find it very amusing, 'coz we all know it didn't work :)

+Jing Garcia You wouldn't download japanese car.

+Mika Korhonen I would xD

Your lucky usually a man pops out and starts rapping about the ills of copying said floppies.

But SX-Window for the Sharp X68000 did come out in 1989 and was on par with Amiga OS 3.x that came out a few years later in terms of features along with neat features like if you dragged something into the terminal window its path would be pasted into the terminal. There was good Japanese operating systems and productive and development software (where even the PlayStation 1 Japanese devs kits ran on Japanese workstations running Japanese Unix distros with Japanese development tools) it is just the software never really made it out of the Japanese market because they were their own little eco-system.

Without Japanese competition, American products would likely be significantly cheaper quality these days. In areas where there is no American competition, that is often the case.

@Andrew Elie Hardly invasive. Anime culture spread passively online. It was simply superior.

Commodore 64 and 128 along with computers like the Atari XL and XE line and Tandy COCO dominated the US market. The C64 was more capable yet cheaper then MSX level 1 and then when MSX2 came along the market had started switching to 16 bit machines like the Amiga,ST, Mac, and PC clones. In Europe there was the Acorn line such as the BBC micro ,the low cost but capable Amstrad CPC, and the very affordable ZX Spectrum to deal with. The biggest mistake is they waited too long. But they did end up breaking into and dominating the game console market.

Now it's the Chinese ... I guess white people are always afraid of the Yellow Peril. Ironically the United States used Industrial Espionage against Japan in the 1990s during trade negotations to sabatoge their economy.

@@coolspot18 and now trying to do Similar with China

Best comment right here, lol.

Nintendo did nothing in the USA that wasn't done by Atari, Mattel or Coleco before them.

​@@GeoNeilUKabsolutely loved Atari😂

Every pronounceable word in Japanese can be rendered in Hiragana, which consists of 48 base characters (but the standard written form is typically in kanji, unless it's a word from another language, then it's typically rendered in rōmaji or katakana). They typically use either rōmaji (which literally means "Roman character"), a romanized version of Japanese, or Hiragana (typically with software-based kana-to-kanji conversion called "input method editors", or IMEs, which sort of function like a spellchecker on English language systems). Japanese keyboards have both hiragana and Roman letters indicated.

You

2019 lol

April 2019!

3019

5 years later

Microsoft destroyed everything it touched in Japan.. including Sega

@referral madness Sega was a successful competitor to nintendo until sega partnered with microsoft and pressured game developers to use the microsoft proprietary framework to make games on the dreamcast.. this was too expensive and restrictive for many of developers at the time and eventually caused the platform to fail... it was fantastic, innovative hardware ruined by terrible software framework from microsoft..

@referral madness is it a wild coincidence that sega failed after partnering with microsoft? and that it was their last console? well you know what, the void left by sega was convenient for microsoft as they wanted a piece of the console market for themselves.. they are an unscrupulous company but if you dont want to see that i cant force you to

​@@jub8891 Sony including a DVD drive in the PS2, combined with a rushed peripherals and blindsiding devs with the Saturn's launch killed Sega more than Microsoft. Microsoft still struggles in Japan to break 10 percent of the video game market. They may have won the PC war, but they've lost the video game one.

Yeah, it's silly how American marketing teams insisted until the late 90's/early 2000's that most Japanese media would not succeed in America, or at least not without modifying it. That's why they'd even go through the extra effort of changing the box art to a more cartoony American style instead of just keeping the beautiful Japanese original art. The market could have been very different if they simply embraced it.

I'd say no. In the US during the 80s, computers were primarily marketed as business machines that could do spreadsheets on and help you with your taxes rather than devices you could play games on. If you wanted to play games, you bought a game console. Contrast this to computers sold in Europe. In America, machines like the Commodore 64 and Amiga were sold as boring business machines. In countries like Britain, these machines were sold as gaming devices and thousands of titles were written for them. In fact, I'd wager more games were made in Britain for the 64/Amiga than in the US. It was just the American mindset at the time.

@@senorverde09 I don't think the Commodore 64 or the Commodore Amiga ever became business computers. Business computers were IBMs and IBM compatible computers back in the 1980s.

Yep, I've had 486 IBM in the 90s and to get a soundcard that works, I would have to import it from States. 20 times the price of a cheap PCI sound blaster compatible, 10 Times more than the creative sb 16. Not really a great deal. And thats a shame cause with 16 megs of RAM I could get so much more from games. But we were listening to Offspring, Green Day and Dog Eat Dog while playing Doom. Could it be more 90s?

This was the mid 80s. Which was the era of 8-bit Computers. 8-bit Computers were known as “Garage Kits”. Because they were literally built in garages and required programmers to write their own language and code.

The NES, or the Famicom was already out in 1983.

According to Wikipedia, the original Famicom was released in 1983, but it wasn't brought to the US as the NES until 1985, and it was brought to Europe in 1986.

Famicom came out in 83

@@Lilbroda "Famicom came out *in Japan* in 83" FTFY, that's the first main reason why it was never mentioned, because this show is targetting the American computer market. The second main reason is that the Famicom was a games console, its only use was gaming, the one field of computing they never nentioned on Computer Chronicles as they only talked about the business and productivity sides (and often spoke disparaging of the Commodore 64 which was used almost entirely as a games conputer and why the British micros, the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, Amstrad CPC wre nevber mentioned either.

@@GeoNeilUK Well, Famicom was only released in Japan, you don't really need to fix my statement.

C64 had already been out by then. It came out in 1982, IIRC. The C64 stuck around for an ungodly amount of time, even as IBM imposed the mainstream standard in the US throughout the 80s. The C64 was seen more as a game machine than a serious computer which, when paired with Commodore USA's incompetence, damaged the Amiga's prospects here.

U stupid.lol

The C64 pretty much killed the MSX in every market they were both sold in.

@ungratefulmetalpansy Without the vision of Jack, they were lost with no direction to go.

I recall the sales stats that show the C64 had a larger absolute market share than the PC line up until the end of '84. Then the market share crossed paths and the PC took off like a rocket forever on. It always just simply intrigued me how the C64 was once bigger than the PC though...I know times were different but still something to ponder.

LOL... 2 years later, someone finally gets your joke.

They never did, they just took up a share of the worlds video game market, but even in the late 80's a big part of the gllobal computer game market (if not the biggest) was in 8-bit micro homecomputers like the C64, Atari400/800, ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Apple II and even IBM PC's and clones. And later by the 16 bit machines (Amiga, Atari ST, 286 PC AT and successors).

Highest for comdex. Comdex was an international trade show that went to different countries.

About 100K, or 117K with the old standard Gigabyte.

​@@anonUK I made a few assumptions but I estimated a "page" to be an A4 sheet of paper. I got a printed document and measured a lowercase letter, which was 2mm square. To fill the entire sheet of A4 (150mm * 105mm) corner to corner with letters of that size, no spaces or borders, works out at 7,875 letters. Assuming we are using ascii to represent characters, that's 7,875 bytes per page. 30,000 pages would ring in at 236,250,000 bytes, let's just round it to 250mb. In reality a page of text has spaces, paragraphs, margins etc. And then there's compression that might be used! I think their fancy laser disc could hold quite a bit more than 30,000 pages :)

@@rickyoswald en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_%28computer_memory%29?wprov=sfla1 A page can be any size that's convenient for the computer/ processor in use. It's a block of memory that can be completely or partially used. If it's partially used, then there's a potential waste of memory, or virtual memory- but if there's a lot of memory to spare, fewer pages means easier data addresses. A "page" may have started as a page of text but even by the mid 80s it had expanded well beyond that. Now, page size is less important as it is often variable and processor speed is thousands of times greater than in the 80s.

@@anonUK Aha neat!

They do, but the flaw in the system is that speaking tests are optional, and that English is taught like other subjects in Japan, drilling knowledge with dull from the front lead classes teaching text books rather than starting to use the language in a useful way. Also Japanese classes are not divided by ability just by year and year group, so you have all abilities in one class, and there is little to no tailoring to that classes overall needs. But the real kicker is that English is part of the High School entrance exam meaning that teachers panic and just drill the textbooks into their kids without any real context or practical use of the language. The problems are multiple and very much rooted in the Japanese education style and culture. This isn't to say the teachers are bad though, they're caught between a rock and a hard place and often hugely overworked and almost all are trying their best. Often the Japanese will say the reason that the kids don't answer or talk is because they're shy, but mostly they're not, they're tired, cranky teenagers in boring classes bored out of their skulls. I find on the whole more of my students are more interested in Korean than English these days, it would make more sense for them to study that as they have the motivation to do so. All the time the Japanese reinforce they are not good at other languages and so it self reinforces, the same can be said for my home country, the UK, that and having English off the bat removes much the need for many people to feel the need to actually try. The other reason is really simple, the barrier to English speakers to learning Japanese is very high, I know first hand, so the reverse is true. It's just as alien :)

It's crazy that Sony had something like that way back in 1984. They introduced it at the same time as CD-ROM, yet the LaserDisc ROM never took off (maybe because it was too large).

IKR!!!! My HDD in 1996 was just 2GB!!!

@@Dustie1984 I bought my first PC in early 1998- it was P166MMX, 32MB RAM, TEAC24x, and 1.6GB Seagate HDD. Good games, like Fallout, would have an option to install all of it onto HDD, to minimize loading times. So with Windows taking up ~700MB, I could have in HDD only one such installed game at a time. And it was a pleasure several years later to get a crazy big 20GB Fujitsu HDD.

@@RazorEdge2006 too expensive.....

or two tubes of tooth paste....

As a pilot the metal butter knife is ridiculous..who the fk would back off from a guy with a butter knife surrounded by hundreds of passengers? Honestly I think most ppl are stupid and extremely selfish to the point they fear any possibility no matter how remote (especially if a butter knife is involved meaning basically impossible) that they may be injured. People would just sit by and do nothjnf or act like a butter knife is a fkn katana.selfishness is the worst trait humans can have

it was a mostly useless gadget... often technology ideas are ahead of their time, the idea might be cool, but it lacks the power to be actually useful. In some cases, it can be successful later when the tech has become better. Like the first digital cameras, they were so crappy that nobody used them for serious work, they kept using analog cameras for years, until the technology had made many steps forward.

It was at an expo, and a lot of tech were demos, and may never have came to market. It would take years to get cost of scale of good hardware to make it worthwhile

you are mistaken. America and Europe certainly knew CD-roms and laptops in 1985

The MSX matched or exceeded the C64 due to its games library. The games were ahead of their time.