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
@@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
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.
@@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 :-)
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.
Insisting on innovation instead of winning "price war" is a very noble idea. And Sony has >3GB storage media back in 1984... The CD-ROM is then a huge success 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
MSX did extremely well later on in Japan and as well as in Eastern Europe, South America, and in Middle East market. The key to the MSX's success was the availability of the great third party software especially from Konami. Many great games were released on the MSX first before they were released on the other platforms; these games such as Final Fantasy, Nemesis, Vampire Killer/Castlevania, Metal Gear Solid, Penguin Adventure, Knightmare and the list goes on. These great games drove the sale for the MSX.
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).
Mi old sony MSX from 1986 still works (after a few repairs), MSX, what a computer sistem! Awesome video, speaking of Gigabytes in 1984! Greetins from Spain.
Air date for this episode was May 7, 1985, and COMDEX Japan happened from March 26-28, 1985. I'm guessing that most of this episode would have been filmed in February/March 1985, though could have been late 1984. August 6, 2022 4:52 am
Holy shit,even in 1984 they had already mini robots, there was the epson wrisp computer with builtin touch screen and the cd-rom for aydio,video,text and commando data on it. While the japanese computer industry had little succes,however 1 year later in 1985,they took the us by storm in the game console market in the form of the Nintendo entertaunment system.
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
@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
My mom worked in Japan in the 80s and 90s and would send me electronics back home. I still have the Japanese sega game gear baby blue color with a Japanese game gear game to this day I still don't know what it is.
When they focused on software internally they nailed the art of video games which they sold as a complete item to the home user and they didn't need to use a computer to run it. After that their position in the digital market changed dramatically. Companies like Nintendo are historically known to be over protective of their code because of this culture.
What Japan lacked at that time was Software Development companies. Their computers came very close, but always lagged behind in terms of computer applications that could be evident in making a computer useful. Why do programming languages like C++, C, Java etc have English syntax?? This tells you everything.
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.
The biggest problem during this time was PC architecture was all over the place and every company had proprietary everything. What's more if you had, let's say, an IBM then there was no guarantee that your version of the IBM would work with software for another version of IBM. This is why I'm so glad they moved to a standard architecture and OS design.
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.
In this episode during the credits there is a different version of the theme or we hear more of the original theme! I wish I knew the name of the full version so I could find it and listen to it!
It appears that the CD-ROM drive was connected to the Sony SMC-70, which was the first computer to use a 3.5" floppy. I wonder if it was actually interfacing with it, or was just displaying pictures on the monitor nearby.
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.
And here I am, once again, watching Computer Chronicles that released before I was born, feeling nostalgia for something I never felt. I got stuck growing up with the dawn of internet advertising, stupid CD's from AOL and home internet still threatening to penetrate the walls of lower income homes. Going to the local community center and booking an hour of computer time so I could play flash games and go on chat rooms, I miss those times, just a little.
"Japanese industry has a firm history of introducing a product in the domestic market first, and only then will the product go overseas." This worked for cars, VCRs, and game consoles such as the NES. This strategy would not work for word processing, spreadsheets and other software, or the creation of an intuitive OS for computers. No Japanese company was in a position to create Windows 3.1 for example, or offer something like Adobe PhotoShop.
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.
I recall in the high-tech startup company I worked at in Silicon Valley, 1986, that Epson dot-matrix printers were very popular. The company also had several IBM-PC compatible Epson PCs that functioned well and were reliable, and many dollars lower than IBM.
The MSX (prior to MSX2) was a poor competitor to the Atari & Commodore 64 computers. The product that could have won was the PC-98 series. The PC-98 was a better PC clone, and could have filled the same role as the Tandy 1000. With their foot in the door, they could have dominated the market.
Well, one thing that certainly did happen is that the videogame market became dominated by Japan, even though the business and personal computer market did not. In fact, this episode was just one year before the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom- and over half a decade later when Nintendo started to have major competition from other companies, they were also Japanese companies, like Sega and Sony. Even once Microsoft released the XBox and subsequent consoles, they're really just one of the contenders, not leading the market. Of course, PC games have done reasonably well too, and those are made by companies all over the world (as are some console games, especially in recent years), but Japan definitely has an enormous presence and influence as far as games are concerned.
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.
@@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.
@9:56 "Multiple hardware vendors and multiple software vendors. There have been no consumer products that became established from a single vendor". He was wrong about MSX, but I think that was the reason IBM eventually lost control of the IBM PC market and why they failed to create a closed system with the PS/2 system.
in UK, our International Computers Limited (ICL) co-designed chips with Fujitsu for their Series 39 VME 'mainframe' range. Very high quality. Eventually ICL became ICL Fujitsu and then the rest of the business stayed with Fujitsu. In the late 90's early '00 we swapped our Fujitsu 'mainframe (one 42 U rack running VME, Unixware & WinNT) for all Fujitsu rack-mount & then blade Intel Win2000 servers. Japanese & German (Fujitsu-Siemens) manufacture and quality control,.. My first dual SAN array was Hitachi and i know that Fujitsu still make storage arrays. However, almost all manufacturing is now in China! Japanese TV technology is still at the forefront and unfortunately the Olympics showcase is delayed again and they are very keen on robots, of course!
@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.
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.
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.
Interesting to watch this in 2023. Nearly 40 years later, Japan's computer industry has eventually mostly collapsed (including mobile), and software never took off. If we go further down the supply chain, even their semiconductor industry ended up shrinking a lot. We'd never thought that when that episode aired.
9:55 japanese lagged behind when approaching the software side of the PC. As you can see in this video, they don't have a problem on the hardware side.
Very interesting to see the early CDROM's. Didn't realize they were being developed so early. I can only imagine what those large CD roms that held gigs cost in equipment and media. Don't guess those took of as I never remember them unless they were just in specilzied industries.
They were used in enterprise environments and universities, libraries also, computers there had local Lans with access to laserdisc storage for encyclopedias etc..
There was so much potential in Japan, but it didn't happen... although the MSX had made it to Europe. But that said, they excelled in the games market..
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.
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.
cd Ram Dask and the laptop did not know in America, Europe and the world except in the year 2000 and it is located in Japan from 1984 really is something unbelievable?
At the 12:00 mark it says "The first Japanese Comdex" event. Then it says it had the highest attendance on record for this event. WELL DUH!! The first of any event will, by default, have the highest attendance. Who scripted this show back in 1984?
As far as I'm concerned Japan got us once in the fight for best computers. That was the Sharp X68000. For its day that thing was a freaking beast. Unfortunately, Sharp never tried selling it here because man it would have sold like a wild fire in the decade of excess. Honestly, I believe had the Neo Geo AES launched in 1985 it would have lead the generation price be-damned.
@@jr2904 My friend, people were out of their gourds in the 1980's. I have stories about that time that are absolutely sh*thouse crazy. Everyone was just nuts and they wanted more. People really chilled the Hell out in the 1990's. Addendum- Have you ever heard of "Brewster's Millions?" If you haven't, look it up and watch it. It's not only a good film but it shows how people acted in the 1980's.
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
5:10 The IBM PC JX - their attempt at a follow-on to the failed PC Jr. They were sufficiently nervous about its prospects to only release it in Japan and Australasia, where it soon sank without trace.
Japan did not do well in pc exports. So they made iconic video games in the 80d and 90s that Japan found their way into the computing market. My mom used to work abroad and worked in Japan in the 80s and 90s. I used to get several Japanese electronics, gadgets and toys. Most items I had no idea what it said.
@@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.
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).
@@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.
14:40 - He is actually wrong, it's not nearly more than 500 times that of a diskette. 1.44MB x 1000 x 50% = 720MB > 540MB 3.28GB however is an absolutely mind blowing amount of storage for 1984. Barely anyone even understood what that number meant in practice. Like telling someone today someone is storing 3.28 Petabytes of data.
@@MJ-uk6lu Yes they did. In fact I have three different PS/2 models from the 80's with a 3.5'' floppy drive and no 5.25'' floppy drive or CD-ROM drive.
@@incumbentvinyl9291 Both of you are partially right. 1.44 MB HD 3.5" disks were introduced in 1986, 2 years after this episode. The 3.5" disks were, at most, 720 KB DS DD disks or 320 KB SS DD (released 1983). However, you would only find them on the original Mac: the Mac 128 KB (early 1984) was SS DD, while the 512 KB (late 1984) introduced DS DD. The highest density standard floppy would be 1.2 MB 5.25" HD (1982), which you would have just been available on the PC/AT (Aug. 1984), otherwise they were 320 KB 5.25" floppies. The PS/2 did bring 3.5" HD disks, but that wasn't until 1987. In sum, commonly available floppies were 320 KB when this was filmed.
+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 :)
excuse my ignorance but I used to always wonder how people typed Japanese and other Asian languages on a computer keyboard. I always thought in the back of my mind they must have these MASSIVE keyboards with hundreds/thousands of keys on them for every character and that it must be insanely difficult to type. :-) When I was a kid I remember thinking that's why computers must not be a popular thing in Japan. I know... I was a dumb kid ;-)
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.
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).
I think if the predictions back then of Japanese computer and electronic takeover had come to fruition we would have at least ended up with quality products at the cost of losing USA manufacturers. But, what ended up happening was China's dominance with the inferior cheap products that are piling up on us today...at the cost of USA manufacturers. Both are bad, but the Japanese path would have at least been a mile better than what we have today.
The Japanese computer market being dominated by low cost home computers with an emphasis on gaming? Sounds like the Eurpoean (certainly the British) market of that time. Also, MSX, a standard for 8 bit computers, that's what we have nowadays with regard to Windows (and even more so with the PC) except our computers aren't 8 bit! Also, why did 14:20 make me wonder if one of the Asian applications on show there was karaoke? Also, I think this episode was made before the NES came over and became the American gaming market (I still can't get over Nintendo having a prototype of the NES that would have been a 8 bit computer and just a console, an 8 bit computer that I think would have sold in the UK far better than the NES did)
This episode was broadcast in 1984 yet they visited Expo ’85? JAL got Stewart Chiefet to Japan, but he did all the time travelling. Edit: Noticed the info card at the beginning said 1985. My mistake.
Mr,Nishi was Microsoft's vice president from 1979 to the 80s. He was 21 years old at that time.
He is still active as a teacher in Japan.
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
Kay Nishi, the guy at 7:46, seems like a super cool dude... I like how he leans into the camera to lay down some serious truth.
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 :-)
Impressive to see a CD-ROM back in 1984. I didn't see one until about 1990 or '91.
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.
Insisting on innovation instead of winning "price war" is a very noble idea. And Sony has >3GB storage media back in 1984... The CD-ROM is then a huge success 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
10:06 I'm genuinely impressed he's speaking English in the correct conversational cadence. Very astute learner, that guy.
The Random Access File at the end is always so interesting, a time capsule in emerging technologies.
Yes especially some of the things mention to be either a success or a total flop.
MSX did extremely well later on in Japan and as well as in Eastern Europe, South America, and in Middle East market. The key to the MSX's success was the availability of the great third party software especially from Konami. Many great games were released on the MSX first before they were released on the other platforms; these games such as Final Fantasy, Nemesis, Vampire Killer/Castlevania, Metal Gear Solid, Penguin Adventure, Knightmare and the list goes on. These great games drove the sale for the MSX.
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!
This "bizarre clam shell case" probably won't catch on...
Mi old sony MSX from 1986 still works (after a few repairs), MSX, what a computer sistem! Awesome video, speaking of Gigabytes in 1984! Greetins from Spain.
Air date for this episode was May 7, 1985, and COMDEX Japan happened from March 26-28, 1985. I'm guessing that most of this episode would have been filmed in February/March 1985, though could have been late 1984.
August 6, 2022 4:52 am
The NEC and Sharp computers came with built-in some of the best Yamaha FM chips, much better than what Soundblaster used.
Holy shit,even in 1984 they had already mini robots, there was the epson wrisp computer with builtin touch screen and the cd-rom for aydio,video,text and commando data on it.
While the japanese computer industry had little succes,however 1 year later in 1985,they took the us by storm in the game console market in the form of the Nintendo entertaunment system.
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
8:20 That guy was very honest
1984 was 3 years before i was even born. it's awesome to watch these old episodes and the computer/industry politics of the time.
25:07 Oh Paul, how you misjudged us...
14:11 and smart watches are thought of as a new concept for some reason
Choked on my glass of water when I heard Stewart Cheifet say "Sashimi Valley."
"What do you mean Doc? All the best stuff comes from Japan."
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
My mom worked in Japan in the 80s and 90s and would send me electronics back home. I still have the Japanese sega game gear baby blue color with a Japanese game gear game to this day I still don't know what it is.
When they focused on software internally they nailed the art of video games which they sold as a complete item to the home user and they didn't need to use a computer to run it. After that their position in the digital market changed dramatically. Companies like Nintendo are historically known to be over protective of their code because of this culture.
Nintendo did nothing in the USA that wasn't done by Atari, Mattel or Coleco before them.
@@GeoNeilUKabsolutely loved Atari😂
@23:56 "Apple says it will instead concentrate on making more Big Macs."
Rofl. I'm imagining an Apple drive through.... XD
What Japan lacked at that time was Software Development companies. Their computers came very close, but always lagged behind in terms of computer applications that could be evident in making a computer useful. Why do programming languages like C++, C, Java etc have English syntax?? This tells you everything.
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.
I'd like to see this show come back.. "The New Computer Chronicles".
The first clam-shell design on a laptop! Looks like where the ibook was inspired from! 13:14
2:44 I had that cute robot once.. (the one holding a CD)
The biggest problem during this time was PC architecture was all over the place and every company had proprietary everything. What's more if you had, let's say, an IBM then there was no guarantee that your version of the IBM would work with software for another version of IBM. This is why I'm so glad they moved to a standard architecture and OS design.
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.
"I don't think you will either" Famous last words!
that epson watch computer, it feels like some sort of smartwatch. and a laser disc that has the same capacity as a dvd.
In this episode during the credits there is a different version of the theme or we hear more of the original theme! I wish I knew the name of the full version so I could find it and listen to it!
It appears that the CD-ROM drive was connected to the Sony SMC-70, which was the first computer to use a 3.5" floppy. I wonder if it was actually interfacing with it, or was just displaying pictures on the monitor nearby.
"The average school now has 8 computers..."
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.
And here I am, once again, watching Computer Chronicles that released before I was born, feeling nostalgia for something I never felt.
I got stuck growing up with the dawn of internet advertising, stupid CD's from AOL and home internet still threatening to penetrate the walls of lower income homes. Going to the local community center and booking an hour of computer time so I could play flash games and go on chat rooms, I miss those times, just a little.
The word for that is anemoia.
@@Ojisan642 Googled to check and it is, thanks for teaching me something new!
"Japanese industry has a firm history of introducing a product in the domestic market first, and only then will the product go overseas." This worked for cars, VCRs, and game consoles such as the NES. This strategy would not work for word processing, spreadsheets and other software, or the creation of an intuitive OS for computers. No Japanese company was in a position to create Windows 3.1 for example, or offer something like Adobe PhotoShop.
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.
The date in the title must be wrong, the Lisa was discontinued in 1985, not 1984.
I recall in the high-tech startup company I worked at in Silicon Valley, 1986, that Epson dot-matrix printers were very popular.
The company also had several IBM-PC compatible Epson PCs that functioned well and were reliable, and many dollars lower than IBM.
The MSX (prior to MSX2) was a poor competitor to the Atari & Commodore 64 computers. The product that could have won was the PC-98 series. The PC-98 was a better PC clone, and could have filled the same role as the Tandy 1000. With their foot in the door, they could have dominated the market.
That magazine issue must be quite collectable/costly I imagine.
Well, one thing that certainly did happen is that the videogame market became dominated by Japan, even though the business and personal computer market did not. In fact, this episode was just one year before the release of the Nintendo Entertainment System / Famicom- and over half a decade later when Nintendo started to have major competition from other companies, they were also Japanese companies, like Sega and Sony. Even once Microsoft released the XBox and subsequent consoles, they're really just one of the contenders, not leading the market. Of course, PC games have done reasonably well too, and those are made by companies all over the world (as are some console games, especially in recent years), but Japan definitely has an enormous presence and influence as far as games are concerned.
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.
@9:56 "Multiple hardware vendors and multiple software vendors. There have been no consumer products that became established from a single vendor".
He was wrong about MSX, but I think that was the reason IBM eventually lost control of the IBM PC market and why they failed to create a closed system with the PS/2 system.
18:50 I thought that was John Cryer playing Walleye from HotShots (j/k)
LOL... 2 years later, someone finally gets your joke.
The Ampere WS1 looks like a fun quirky machine. This is the first time I've ever seen one.
in UK, our International Computers Limited (ICL) co-designed chips with Fujitsu for their Series 39 VME 'mainframe' range. Very high quality. Eventually ICL became ICL Fujitsu and then the rest of the business stayed with Fujitsu. In the late 90's early '00 we swapped our Fujitsu 'mainframe (one 42 U rack running VME, Unixware & WinNT) for all Fujitsu rack-mount & then blade Intel Win2000 servers. Japanese & German (Fujitsu-Siemens) manufacture and quality control,.. My first dual SAN array was Hitachi and i know that Fujitsu still make storage arrays. However, almost all manufacturing is now in China! Japanese TV technology is still at the forefront and unfortunately the Olympics showcase is delayed again and they are very keen on robots, of course!
Windows 95 on the NEC was the last we would see from NEC`s proprietary PC world. It died badly.
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.
It was in 1985, not 1984. The Comdex expo in Japan took place in april 1985 and the show was aired on may, according to the first image in the video.
Watching in 2020 and I was an MSX kid :)
@12:43
That digitizing kanji pad, though! Where can I order the CIC Handwriter?
Fear of Japanese invasion was so real. I was 3 years old when this show aired.
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
But what has Paul Schindler done with a butter knife...?
I don't like him.
Interesting to watch this in 2023. Nearly 40 years later, Japan's computer industry has eventually mostly collapsed (including mobile), and software never took off. If we go further down the supply chain, even their semiconductor industry ended up shrinking a lot. We'd never thought that when that episode aired.
9:55 japanese lagged behind when approaching the software side of the PC. As you can see in this video, they don't have a problem on the hardware side.
27:08 ... Stewart Cheifet's wardrobe courtesy Botany 500. Some parts not effecting the outcome of the game were edited.
8:19 is quite telling. And in 2020 this is one reason why Japan doesn’t lead in software development.
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
Very interesting to see the early CDROM's. Didn't realize they were being developed so early. I can only imagine what those large CD roms that held gigs cost in equipment and media. Don't guess those took of as I never remember them unless they were just in specilzied industries.
Both Sony and Phillips started developing them at the same time back then.
They were used in enterprise environments and universities, libraries also, computers there had local Lans with access to laserdisc storage for encyclopedias etc..
RIP Gary Kildall
Paul Schindler is right in his prediction for once.😮
There was so much potential in Japan, but it didn't happen... although the MSX had made it to Europe.
But that said, they excelled in the games market..
the time gap between this broadcast and today is the same time frame as when this broadcast was aired and the dropping of the nukes on japan
then along comes the comodore 64..... That thing sold like crack.
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.
20:45 he literally predicted the future!!!
23:56 Who knew Apple was making McDonald’s popular burger? ;-)
Best comment right here, lol.
cd Ram Dask and the laptop did not know in America, Europe and the world except in the year 2000 and it is located in Japan from 1984 really is something unbelievable?
you are mistaken. America and Europe certainly knew CD-roms and laptops in 1985
the japanese were very scary back in the day, but they were easily tamed by elvis on karaoke.
🎵 YOU NOTHING BUT HOUND DOG 🎵
At the 12:00 mark it says "The first Japanese Comdex" event. Then it says it had the highest attendance on record for this event. WELL DUH!! The first of any event will, by default, have the highest attendance. Who scripted this show back in 1984?
Highest for comdex. Comdex was an international trade show that went to different countries.
OMG.. I saw HP-UX booth @ 15:00
"Don't worry about Japan, I don't!!" - That aged really well didn't it mate? About as well as that jumper 🤣🤣
That's on hell of a comb over!
14:24 Shit! I was only 2 and this was out lol
As far as I'm concerned Japan got us once in the fight for best computers. That was the Sharp X68000. For its day that thing was a freaking beast. Unfortunately, Sharp never tried selling it here because man it would have sold like a wild fire in the decade of excess. Honestly, I believe had the Neo Geo AES launched in 1985 it would have lead the generation price be-damned.
Price will not be damned by consumers lol. Sony learned that with the PS3
@@jr2904
Wrong decade. You cannot compare 2006 with 1987. They did not call the 1980's the decade of excess for nothing.
@@jr2904
My friend, people were out of their gourds in the 1980's. I have stories about that time that are absolutely sh*thouse crazy. Everyone was just nuts and they wanted more. People really chilled the Hell out in the 1990's.
Addendum- Have you ever heard of "Brewster's Millions?" If you haven't, look it up and watch it. It's not only a good film but it shows how people acted in the 1980's.
14:08 how in the fuck did that not advanced more!? That's super advanced for the 80's and we got the apple watch years ago
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
5:10 The IBM PC JX - their attempt at a follow-on to the failed PC Jr. They were sufficiently nervous about its prospects to only release it in Japan and Australasia, where it soon sank without trace.
The Japanese Peach PC was "light years" ahead of Apple early to mid-80s.
My respects to Kay Nishi, a pioneer in this computer biz.
A year before the NES would be released in the US and the rebirth of video game consoles in the country as well
Japan did not do well in pc exports. So they made iconic video games in the 80d and 90s that Japan found their way into the computing market. My mom used to work abroad and worked in Japan in the 80s and 90s. I used to get several Japanese electronics, gadgets and toys. Most items I had no idea what it said.
American companies didn't foresee the Japanese computers getting into American homes through game consoles.
Japanese Phoenix miracle is memory of 20th century, 21th century now is own by Chinese Dragon monster
Interesting look into the end of the u.s. in progress.
@16:00 "sony offered a large size laser disk with a capacity of 3.28 gigabytes, or around 30,000 pages".
How fking big are those pages?
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!
Title card does not match UA-cam file description.
25:25 sure.... you didn't make any illegal copies
3.28 gigabytes?!? Holy wow!
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.....
14:40 - He is actually wrong, it's not nearly more than 500 times that of a diskette.
1.44MB x 1000 x 50% = 720MB > 540MB
3.28GB however is an absolutely mind blowing amount of storage for 1984. Barely anyone even understood what that number meant in practice. Like telling someone today someone is storing 3.28 Petabytes of data.
Dude, it was 80s and they didn't have 3.5" floppies yet. Most common size was 5.25" and probably 720k.
@@MJ-uk6lu Yes they did. In fact I have three different PS/2 models from the 80's with a 3.5'' floppy drive and no 5.25'' floppy drive or CD-ROM drive.
@@incumbentvinyl9291 Both of you are partially right. 1.44 MB HD 3.5" disks were introduced in 1986, 2 years after this episode. The 3.5" disks were, at most, 720 KB DS DD disks or 320 KB SS DD (released 1983). However, you would only find them on the original Mac: the Mac 128 KB (early 1984) was SS DD, while the 512 KB (late 1984) introduced DS DD. The highest density standard floppy would be 1.2 MB 5.25" HD (1982), which you would have just been available on the PC/AT (Aug. 1984), otherwise they were 320 KB 5.25" floppies. The PS/2 did bring 3.5" HD disks, but that wasn't until 1987.
In sum, commonly available floppies were 320 KB when this was filmed.
if you speak japanese on expo, they was almost 10 year advanced.
don't copy that floppy.
+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.
Very good
I wanna see that Le Point IBM ad
excuse my ignorance but I used to always wonder how people typed Japanese and other Asian languages on a computer keyboard. I always thought in the back of my mind they must have these MASSIVE keyboards with hundreds/thousands of keys on them for every character and that it must be insanely difficult to type. :-) When I was a kid I remember thinking that's why computers must not be a popular thing in Japan. I know... I was a dumb kid ;-)
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.
23:55 - Can I have fries with that?
After a couple of years, Nintendo and Sony were like '' grab my sake.. Let's take over the world ''
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).
need for a clear separation of hardware and software, hmm.. finally the closed ecosystem worked quite well for apple iOS didnt it?
I think if the predictions back then of Japanese computer and electronic takeover had come to fruition we would have at least ended up with quality products at the cost of losing USA manufacturers. But, what ended up happening was China's dominance with the inferior cheap products that are piling up on us today...at the cost of USA manufacturers. Both are bad, but the Japanese path would have at least been a mile better than what we have today.
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!
Paul Schindler is Jello Biafra's twin
The Japanese computer market being dominated by low cost home computers with an emphasis on gaming? Sounds like the Eurpoean (certainly the British) market of that time.
Also, MSX, a standard for 8 bit computers, that's what we have nowadays with regard to Windows (and even more so with the PC) except our computers aren't 8 bit!
Also, why did 14:20 make me wonder if one of the Asian applications on show there was karaoke?
Also, I think this episode was made before the NES came over and became the American gaming market (I still can't get over Nintendo having a prototype of the NES that would have been a 8 bit computer and just a console, an 8 bit computer that I think would have sold in the UK far better than the NES did)
hah... DBase... I still have a pile of data in dbase format on floppy I need to rescue.
This episode was broadcast in 1984 yet they visited Expo ’85? JAL got Stewart Chiefet to Japan, but he did all the time travelling.
Edit: Noticed the info card at the beginning said 1985. My mistake.
That's a production slate, typical of most shows produced to start off the master tape.
Would have been funny if he continued to say in the intro:
"My uncle said he had a lot of Japan all over him in the war too."
RIP Lisa
16:16 has any youtuber covered this game?
3:27 is that a xerox alto display?
Watching in 2020