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This reminded me that Japan really had a divergent set of technology. They had PCs with Japanese characters in ROMs which were incompatible with European/American PCs but still ran MS-DOS and Windows. twitter.com/andrewchen/sta…

And as the Wikipedia article explains cellphones that could do email when we were still stuck with WAP and SMS messages.

They also had their own lines of home computers. As a kid, we would spend the summer vacations at my grandparents house and I would try to apply my C64 knowledge to the MSX line of computers. Good memories ;)

So this is a reminder that there are other countries and cultures that even today might have a different set of technologies which can be even more advanced than the European/US variants.

Not implying that everybody thinks that Europe/US is better, but I guess for many that’s the frame of reference.

Here is the Wikipedia article to the NEC PC-9800 series en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-9800_s… Looks like a PC, runs ported versions of the usual OSes, but really is not a simple PC clone.

Technologically, I think one reason was that the data you needed for dealing with the Japanese writing system was much too large to do in software in the 1980s and 1990s. There are thousand of characters with different reading. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_…