Episode 15 Presentations made at the exhibition

Surprised by the response to the Japanese language input system　
Valuable inspiration received from Microsoft

The concept of “Japanese language input at the OS level,” which was born out of communication with our business partner, Logic
Systems International, was presented at the data show and evoked a resounding response. Researchers from IBM in the U.S. came to our booth one after another, much to our surprise. In the midst of all this, Hatsuko, who was in charge of development, had a slight concern on her mind.

By that time, we at JustSystems had expanded our business beyond the sale of office computers (so-called “off-comp”) to include the
development of dairy management and other business software.

The programming language we used to create the software was “Microsoft BASIC Compiler (BASCOM)”. “Perhaps we need to pay a
license fee to Microsoft.” Said Hatsuko, and called ASCII Microsoft in Tokyo.

“I see, so you are calling from Shikoku. Please wait a moment. I’ll put Furukawa on the phone for you.”
It was Mr. Susumu Furukawa who was put on the phone. He was the man who would later become the first president of Microsoft Japan.
After listening to Hatsuko’s explanations, Mr. Furukawa replied, “While others are using BASIC without asking us, you guys are
honest.” Mr. Furukawa expressed his interest in the development that Hatsuko was responsible for, not in having her pay for the license
fee.
Mr. Furukawa already heard that a Japanese language input system was developed by a Logic Systems distributor somewhere in
Shikoku.
“That’s right. We are JustSystems in Tokushima.”

After Hatsuko answered like this, Mr. Furukawa asked many questions about the Japanese language input system. Finally, he said,
“Please come visit us someday.”

Later, when we visited ASCII on our trip to Tokyo, Mr. Furukawa was unfortunately not there. He had to go to Seattle, where Microsoft
is headquartered, on an urgent business trip. Instead, we were met by a person who had only been with the company for four days. That
person was Makoto Naruke. He was the one who would later succeed Mr. Furukawa as the second president of Microsoft Japan.

Since he had just joined the company, it was not at this time that we were able to have an in-depth conversation with Mr. Naruke.
However, Hatsuko still clearly remembers that Mr. Naruke gave her valuable inspiration a little later.

“I think we need to create a more common, ordinary word processor that anyone can use.”

By further evolving the Japanese language input system developed by Hatsuko, we introduced Ichitaro, which later became a huge hit.

Instead of using special keys, conversions were done with the space key, which was not used for Japanese language input at the time. I
was responsible for research using dictionaries. I picked up various words from newspapers and other sources and rearranged them in
the order of words that I thought would be used most frequently.

As we had expected, Ichitaro became widely accepted by many people as software that everyone who used personal computers at that
time was involved with. Then time passed, and in the late 1990s, Microsoft began to advance into the Japanese market. The word
processing software that emerged as our competition at that time was “Word”.

Although I have reservations about their sales approaches, Ichitaro was ultimately defeated by Word. However, it is probably an
unknown fact that we were inspired by the Microsoft executives who would later become our rivals, leading to the birth of Ichitaro. If
you call it fate, that’s the end of the story. What an ironic twist of fate, that was what I thought.

We unveiled the “NCR9005”
with Japanese language input capability.