Re: tlug: parallel-port IDE

[Karl-Max Wagner <karlmax@example.com>]

> Fascinating article (really, I didn't know a lot of that stuff before).

Thanks. However, I only sketched the hallmarks. Actually the
story is much, much longer. However, I strongly recommend
reading Konrad Zuse's book "Der Computer, mein Lebenswerk" ( The
computer, the work of my  life ) for more details.

> Anyhow, as your article pointed out, computer development was largely a
> European and American deal.  The Asians seem to have been left out of the
> early stages of it almost completely.  The computers of today can function

Obviously. That's EXACTLY where the complex writing systems
stood in the way. How do you create a typewriter for Japanese ?
It's unbelievably complex. The I/O devices of the early
computers were tty machines. The technology of the time was
simply not sufficiently advanced to handle that. Today we use
( more or less ) phonetic entry and probability driven software
to find the right kanji. This requires hundreds of kilobytes of
complex code and considerable computing power. This is far
beyond the capabilities of a Z3 or even the UNIVAC I.

Todays computers are fourteen orders of magnitude more powerful
than the Z3 ( it seems unbelievable, but it is a fact ). Today
we routinely do things that were far beyond the wildest dreams
of the early computer pionneers.

> with most European languages fairly easily, but require extensive software
> modifications to understand asian languages properly.

See above....

> Now, I'm not sure how things would have been different if the Chinese or
> the Japanese had been more involved - there are certain inherent problems

That was not an option - see above.

> with written languages that are several orders of magnitude more complex
> than the average European language, when you have a limited amount of desk

EXACTLY. You name it. This is what I pointed at some months ago
where I proposed getting rid of the Kanji completely. You can
draw up a huge list of things where Kanji stood in the way -
from Gutenberg to modern computing - and I fear that the
nefarious effects of the Kanji system haven't come to an end
yet. Just think of microcontrollers for cheap appliances with
just a few KB's of memory. Good enough for outputting alphabetic
messages. For kanji messages you might have to add more memory -
you could end up with needing most of the processing power and
the memory for just outputting Kanji. It goes without much
further commenting that this will drive the cost up.

> space for your keyboard.  Besides, knowing the Japanese propensity for
> NIH, we might have ended up with UNIVAC-98 from NEC :)

Hmmm. This in fact is kind of a inferiority complex. Never
forget that pretty much ALL of modern science and technology
comes from outside. Japan started out in the last century with a
state of the art of the a thousand years back from what the
outside world had ( well - not completely. We owe, for an
example, the way we calculate pi ot the Japanese mathematicians
Kenko Takebe and Ryohitsu Matsunaga. However, such things were
pretty rare ). Then they had to play catch up for more than a
century to reduce that gap to zero. It goes without saying that
this has deeply shaken how the Japanese look at themselves -
just try to imagine how you'd feel in such a setting. Probably
somewhat queer, isn't it. It is a shitty situation for sure.

But as they say, shit happens.....

================================================================
"It was hell. They knew it.          Karl-Max Wagner
  But they called it                 karlmax@example.com
    W-I-N-D-O-Z-E"
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