"What is this processor? The SuperH processor is a Japanese design developed by Hitachi in the late 1990's. As a second generation hybrid RISC design it was easier for compilers to generate good code for than earlier RISC chips, and it recaptured much of the code density of earlier CISC designs by using fixed length 16 bit instructions (with 32 bit register size and address space), using microcoding to allow some instructions to perform multiple clock cycles of work. (Earlier pure risc designs used one instruction per clock cycle even when that served no purpose but to make the code bigger and exhaust the encoding space.)
Hitachi developed 4 generations of SuperH. SH2 made it to the United states in the Sega Saturn game console, and SH4 powered the Sega Dreamcast. They were also widely used in areas outside the US cosumer market, such as the japanese automative industry.
But during the height of SuperH's development, the 1997 asian economic crisis caused Hitachi to tighten its belt, eventually partnering with Mitsubishi to spin off its microprocessor division into a new company called "Renesas". This new company did not inherit the Hitachi engineers who had designed SuperH, and Renesas' own attempts at further development on SuperH didn't even interest enough customers for the result to go ito production. Eventually Renesas moved on to new designs it had developed entirely in-house, and SuperH receded in importance to them... until the patents expired."
Interesting point of history— the H8 processor is the MCU that powers the original Lego Mindstorms RCX. In high school I wrote some assembly language for it when making a robot that ran on BrickOS:
a slightly different (but close enough) Hitachi CPU also powered the Cybiko - a wacky games console few have heard of. I tried writing a disassembler for that particular cpu a while back. Was an interesting platform and oh man the documentation at least to me was gorgeous: github.com/kn100/cybemu/
As an aside my recent trip to Japan, I hit up all the crazy gaming stores hoping to find an FM Towns or the even more rare FM Towns Marty.
They looked at me like I was a three headed monkey.
I looked around too - Mandarake only had popular consoles; Super Potato in Akihabara and Retro TV Game Revival in Osaka had MSX, but no FM Towns. The store clerk read my enquiry off Google Translate on my phone and gave me a one-word reply: いいえ.
It probably takes local expertise to find one in someone's attic. Playing its Lupin III exclusive game might have to remain a MAME job.
I think this somewhat misses an important nuance. Japanese PCs had to be different early on because of the complexities of the written language. All of the important characters could be handled in just a few bits (7 or 8) and low resolution in Western markets, with different fonts and character maps dropped in to support a few different alphabets.
But in CJK countries, things were much harder and the entire I/O system had to be significantly more capable than what might pass for usable elsewhere. This meant larger ROMs, larger framebuffers, higher resolution displays, more complex keyboarding systems, the works. Everything was harder and more expensive for a long time. A common add-on was ROMs with Kanji (Chinese derived characters) support in the same way a person in the West might buy a new sound card or get a VGA card. Except this was just so you could use your new $1200 computer (in today's money) to write things on.
Back then, given limited memory, you also ended up with a ton of different display modes that offered different tradeoffs between color, resolution, and refresh. Because of the complex character sets, these Japanese systems tended to focus on fewer colors and higher resolution while the west focused on more colors at a lower res in the same or less memory space (any fans of mode 13h?). The first PC-98 (the 9801) shipped in 1982 with 128k of RAM and a 640x400 display with special display hardware. The equivalent IBM-PC shipped with 16KB of RAM and CGA graphics which could give you a display no higher than 640x200 with 1-bit colors but was mostly used in 320x200 with 4 (terrible) colors.
Even with similar base architectures, these formative differences meant that lots of the guts of the systems were laid out different to accommodate this -- especially in the memory maps.
By the time "conventional" PCs were able to handle the character display needs (sometime in the mid-90s), they were selling in the millions of units per anum which drove down their per unit prices.
The Japanese market was severely fractured and in a smaller addressable market. Per unit costs were higher, but the software was largely the same. Porting the same businessware to half a dozen platforms cost too much. So now the average user of the Japanese systems had a smaller library of software which was more or less a copy of what was on IBM PCs, on more expensive hardware -- market forces solved the rest.
(btw, the FM Towns, IIR, also had specialized graphics hardware to produce arcade-like graphics with tiles and sprites and so on, making it even more different)
Some of this history also informs why home computing lagged in Japan compared to the West despite having all of the other prerequisites for it to take off.
graphics
memory maps
Excellent summary. A few additional comments from personal memory:
I have lived in Japan since 1983, and I started working as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator in 1986. I wanted to produce clean-looking text in English for my clients, so after a few months using a manual typewriter I took out a loan and bought a Macintosh with a dot-matrix printer. If I remember correctly, it cost six hundred thousand yen. The Mac could not handle Japanese; when I needed to write Japanese text, such as for notes to clients, I wrote by hand. I eventually bought a dedicated Japanese word processor for writing clean text in Japanese.
Around 1992, I bought a modem and went online, first to a local foreign-run BBS and then, a couple of years later, the Internet. Many of the first friends I made online were Japanese-English translators like myself, and some of the most active discussion groups I took part in were about the Japanese language and translation.
The display of Japanese characters in our online discussions was a problem for a long time. Even as more and more of the participants became able to type Japanese on their own computers, they were using a variety of OSs and character encodings, and the Japanese parts of their messages, when posted online, would be corrupted more often than not. When discussing a particular Japanese expression, we would have to romanize the Japanese and, sometimes, explain what kanji were used.
Here’s are two examples from posts to a translators’ mailing list in 1998:
> While this handbook uses "åòå≈ê´" for "robustness", the systems engineers I work with prefer "ÉçÉoÉXÉgê´" <robasutosei>.
> Ruth, the kanji for taikou are tai (as in taishi - Crown Prince) and kou (as in kugurido - the radical is mon with gou inside (gou = au/awasersu). Does this help? The dictionary meaning obviously does not make sense here.
This made it impractical to discuss longer texts or to have our discussions in both English and Japanese.
It was a great relief when, around 2000 or so, the encoding issues were gradually resolved and we became able to write Japanese freely in our online discussions.
(Addendum: I am still in touch with some of the people on that mailing list, including the Ruth mentioned above. In fact, last month I attended a party in Yokohama in honor of her and her husband’s 55th wedding anniversary. Several other friends I first met online in the mid-1990s were there, too.)
Oh wow, that's a great personal story.
I would imagine things begin to improve around 2000 due to the broad adoption of unicode? I remember there being an absolutely huge number of encoding systems for the various CJK languages back then, but I think Windows eventually guessed/settled on UTF-16 IIR.
I didn't live in Asia during this time, but was heavily involved in writing some multilingual capable desktop windows software and was very aware of these challenges. I remember one colleague who worked on our Chinese language material having to buy an expensive copy of a Chinese British telegraph code book.
What a wonderful story.
I spent a while playing with `iconv` commands to solve your mojibake, reinterpreting bytes in and out of Shift-JIS, but I didn't get it - i'd love it if anyone managed to figure out the exact encoding,
Even in the larger commercial computer space, Japan always liked to sorta do their own thing. Aside from a couple other companies, they were always big Itanium backers for example.
I was an analyst during that period and Japan was always something of an outlier. (Europe was to some degree as well. But less so.)
Very interesting! Thanks for posting this!
Also worth watching: Why is Japan So Weak in Software? by Asianometry
Reminds me of a Japanese software company I applied and interviewed at when I graduated university. Company name? Bug Software.
A quick internet search shows no relevant results for the company.
Asianometry also has a video on the history of the Japanese PC market,
I wish there was a TL;DW bot to summarize a videos like this. I’m curious but not in a place i could easily watch a video.
You can ask Gemini to summarize a YouTube video for you! Also if you have YouTube Premium on Android, you can ask questions about the current video.
Here's Gemini's summary of GP's video: https://g.co/gemini/share/8c0417024a3f
Asianometry's videos are good precisely because of the detail and background he goes into. If you summarize them you take that away and pretty much just end up with what has already been said here.
It's a 20 minute long video, the information density can almost certainly be denser.
> It's a 20 minute long video
You mean 20 minutes short. There's enough in there to blow it up into a 45 minute documentary at least. You already spent more than 20 minutes commenting under this story.
> The information density can almost certainly be denser.
And what would be the point of that? There's a limited amount of information one can retain in a short span of time, and it's not like he repeats himself or has a verbose style.
I already go back and rewatch his videos later, taking new pieces of information from them.
Again, if you want the tldw, it's already in the comments here. If you want the details, go watch the video.
The video is being linked because the video itself is good. Wanting a summary that retains the same qualities is like wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
I generally read faster than some narrator slowly babbling on over a meandering script, so that is 20 minutes long. If the video is 20 minutes long, I wager I can read an equivalent article in less than 5 minutes and come out enlightened all the same.
Videos are great for getting the eyes of the general man who doesn't have a preconceived interest in a subject, you're trying to bait clicks and videos are great for that. For people already interested in the subject though? Videos are almost always a literal waste of time compared to a well written article.
And if you wanna say I have a short attention span: Sue me. I'm a 35 year old millenial, we're infamous for having short attention spans.
Someone posted this link on HN a short while ago
there are many such sites if you just google for them
Watch later
I never thought about this before, but product competition is basically evolution in action. Entities with more desirable traits that adapt better to a given ecosystem survive, the rest don't. (In addition to things like a pre-existing dominant species having advantages over new ones)
(fwiw, Windows won out because it had better business strategy. Apple wanted to be in everyone's homes; Microsoft wanted to be in everyone's business. One of those is easier to sell to in bulk, and easier to charge more money. In addition, Windows being more hardware-agnostic, and encouraging an ecosystem of competing hardware manufacturers, allowed them to invest less in hardware themselves, while creating an industry that would vie for business on Microsoft's behalf. This is of course different than the "workstation" market of uber-high-powered individual computers, which sort-of still exists, though with PC hardware)
Windows also won by parasitizing a previously bigger host (Bill Gates’ mother was on IBM’s board), and shutting out competition by forcing vendors not to offer other companies’ software if they wanted Microsoft licenses at better than retail pricing.
Bill Gates' mother, Mary Gates, was not an IBM board member.
She was on the national United Way's executive committee. Also an executive committee member was IBM's Chairman, John Opel.
see https://www.nytimes.com/1994/06/11/obituaries/mary-gates-64-...
[edit]
also Windows OEMs always got lower than retail price for Windows licenses (assuming your volume sold was high enough)
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows#... :
====
Microsoft once assessed license fees based on the number of computers an OEM sold, regardless of whether a Windows license was included. Beginning in 1983, Microsoft sold MS-DOS licenses to OEMs on an individually negotiated basis. The contracts required OEMs to purchase a number of MS-DOS licenses equal to or greater than the number of computers sold, with the result of zero marginal cost for OEMs to include MS-DOS. Installing an operating system other than MS-DOS would effectively require double payment of operating system royalties. Also, Microsoft penalized OEMs that installed alternative operating systems by making their license terms less favorable. Microsoft entered into a consent decree in 1994 that barred them from conditioning the availability of Windows licenses or varying their prices based on whether OEMs distributed other operating systems.
...
In 2009, Microsoft stated that it has always charged OEMs about $50 for a Windows license on a $1,000 computer.
====
This is how MS-DOS and early Windows won. But the first version of MS Excel was written for MacOS. And it's MSO what's holding businesses on Windows, not the other way around.
MSO doesn't work in WINE at least the latest versions don't.
Yes! And it's very interesting to consider two additional things:
1. how seemingly "less capable" technologies win out in this evolutionary environment
2. how plentiful VC (and to some extent government funding for R&D) distorts normal "evolutionary" forces in a market
1. In that case those that were adopted tended to be the cheaper and more ubiquitous technologies, ie, at a biological level just more calorically cheaper to adopt and perhaps efficient to maintain.
2. VC and general funding, ie supporting an entity, is a feature of evolution.
I guess I expected better of HN but it seems people don't realize that nothing we can do will stop evolution and everything we do is just a feature of it.
And entities that become too great and harmful to other entities (monopolistic) get challenged, even if they can provide some good, and from that challenge they sometimes get parasitized as well. Business competition, therefore human behavior, is natural no matter what way you want to politicize it.
This would be much more comprehensible if the author would include some dates.
I was gonna say, the same thing that happened to all the western PC platforms that weren't Microsoft or Apple. Commodore and Atari and Acorn and Sinclair and Dragon and probably dozens of others I've never heard of. As computers became more powerful and development costs rose, small-market architectures and OSes simply became unsustainable. You had to either reach sustained global success or die.
I'm sure there were some unique challenges for architectures that mainly served Japan, but I doubt they were that much worse than the ones facing the ones that mainly served, say, Britain. All of them lost the race in the end.
The same thing happened again with graphical cellphones! In the flip-phone era there were a zillion different OSes with their own app libraries. For a while it looked like Blackberry was set to be the Microsoft of the upcoming smartphone era, and then Apple stole their thunder, and no one could compete except Android and Windows Phone, and then Windows Phone dropped out too, and now we're back to two basic architectures with no meaningful competitors, just like the home PC market by 1996.
> By 1994 though, they had a problem: the 32-bit consoles were out, which could do 2D games just as well as the FM Towns and X68000, and the consoles could also do 3D that blew away anything those computers could handle.
This line from the article caught my eye in particular, because it's similar to what happened to Commodore's Amiga, one of the last real Microsoft competitors in the West. Essentially, Doom killed it. There's a rather tragic list of Amiga games that struggled valiantly to be Doom on that platform, and some of them were pretty good but none of them could really match what Id could with a tricked-out DOS machine in 1993, and that was more or less that.
is "PC platform" the standard term here? I'm not saying it isn't, it just sounds a little odd to me.
Yes, it stands for "Personal Computer Platform".
How about the US and MS ruining everything as usual?
"In April 1989 the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative issued a preliminary report accusing BTRON of being a trade barrier, as it only functioned in Japan, and asked the Japanese government not to make it standard in schools. TRON was included along with rice, semiconductors, and telecommunications equipment in a list of items targeted by Super-301 (complete stop of import based on section 301 of the Omnibus Trade and Competitiveness Act of 1988). It was removed from the list after the USTR inspection team visited the TRON Association in May. In June the Japanese government expressed their regret at U.S. intervention but accepted this request not to make it standard in schools, thus ending the BTRON project. Callon opines that the project had nevertheless run into such difficulties that the U.S. intervention allowed the government to save face from cancelling the project.
According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard. In the 1980s Microsoft had at least once lobbied Washington about TRON until backing off, but Ken Sakamura himself believed Microsoft wasn't the impetus behind the Super-301 listing in 1989. Known for his off the cuff remarks, in 2004 governor of Tokyo Shintaro Ishihara mentioned in his column post concerning international trade policy that TRON was dropped because Carla Anderson Hills had threatened Ryutaro Hashimoto over it."
No; Japan would have eventually stumbled and fell into obscurity even without any American interference. It's a running joke at this point, because Japanese cannot compromise quality to make costs reasonable.
In an environment where the world produces goods 80~90% as good as Japanese ones for 1/4th~1/8th the cost, who in their right mind buys Japanese? This is what happened to Japan's entire electronics industry, home appliance industry, and more. Japan still has a domestic computer industry by a technicality (it's all Made In China) primarily fended over by Hitachi and Panasonic, but most westerners likely won't know because they simply don't sell overseas.
I'm not going to bother getting into how Japanese are horrible with software too.
The cost/quality thing doesn't mean they couldn't have maintained a "halo product" line that steered the platform. It could have been like the early 1990s PC market: government with a 'buy domestic' mandate or budget-no-object buyers might have bought a PS/2 Model 80 or Deskpro 386, but the masses, especially overseas, would buy a white-box 386DX made of Taiwanese parts.
There's an interesting contrast: while Japan produced MSX-- a clear example that a multi-vendor standard can be wildly successful-- they missed the idea of a clone ecosystem for their heavier-duty professional machines. Why weren't there vendors cranking out clones of the PC-98, FM Towns, or X68000? Did they require more propriatery special sauce than an IBM 5150, or was there a cultural/market difficulty that would have caused them to flop on the market?
OTOH, perhaps part of the problem was that the features Japan needed had poor cost/benefit ratios outside of the CJK market: you either have to make the enhanced video stuff optional, reducing platform standardization, or charge people for a feature they don't see as immediately beneficial.
sadly, no pics. The FM Towns was kinda cool looking