The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting question: what happened to all those companies who made those Japanese computer platforms that were never released outside Japan? I thought it'd be worth expanding that answer into a full-size post for cohost.
A quick introduction: the players
I think people in their 20s and younger maybe don't realize just how much variety there used to be in the computer space. There were a lot of different computer platforms, pretty much all of them totally incompatible with each other. North America settled on the IBM PC/Mac duopoly pretty early1, but Europe still had plenty of other computers popular well into the 90s, and Japan had its own computers that pretty much didn't exist anywhere else.
So who were they? By the 16-bit computer era, there's three I'm going to talk about today2: NEC's PC-98, Fujitsu's FM Towns, and Sharp's X68000. The PC-98 was far and away the biggest of those platforms, with the other two having a more niche market.
The PC-98 in a time of transition
First, a quick digression: what is this DOS thing?
The thing about DOS is that it's a much thinner OS than you're used to these days. When you're writing DOS software of any kind of complexity, you're talking straight to the hardware, or to drivers that are specific to particular classes of hardware. When we talk about "DOS" over here, we mean "DOS on IBM compatible PCs". PC-98 and FM Towns both had DOS-based operating systems, but their hardware was nothing at all like IBM compatible PCs and there was no level of software compatibility between them. The PC-98 was originally a DOS-based computer without a GUI of any kind - just like DOS-based IBM PCs. When we talk about "PC-98" games and software, what we really mean is DOS-based PC-98 software that only runs on that platform.
Windows software is very different from DOS in one important way: Windows incorporates a hardware abstraction layer. Software written for Windows APIs doesn't need to be specific to particular hardware, and that set the stage for the major transition that was going to come.
NEC and Microsoft teamed up on porting Windows to the PC-98 platform. Both the PC-98 and the IBM PC use the same CPU, even though the rest of their hardware is very different, which made the port technically feasible. The first Windows release for PC-98 came out in 1992, but Windows didn't really take off in a big way until Windows 95 in the mid-90s. And so, suddenly, for the first time software could run on both IBM PCs running Japanese language Windows and PC-98 running Windows.3 Software developers didn't have to do anything special to get that compatibility: it happened by default, so long as they were using the normal Windows software features.
Around the same time, NEC started making IBM-compatible PCs. As far as I can tell, they made both PC-98s and IBM PCs alongside each other for quite a few years. With Windows software not caring what the underlying hardware was, the distinction between "PC-98" and "PC" got a lot fuzzier. If you were buying a PC, you had no reason to buy a PC-98 unless you wanted to run DOS-based PC-98 software. If you just wanted that shiny new Windows software, why not buy the cheaper IBM PC that NEC would also sell you?
So, for the PC-98, the answer isn't really that it died - it sort of faded away and merged into what every other system was becoming.
The FM Towns
The FM Towns had a fairly similar transition. While it had a homegrown GUI-based OS called Towns OS, it was relatively primitive compared to Windows 3 and especially Windows 95. The FM Towns also used the same CPU as IBM PCs and the PC-98, which means Microsoft could work with Fujitsu to port their software to the platform. And, just like what happened with the PC-98, the platform became far less relevant and less distinctive when it was just another platform to run Windows software on. If you didn't care about running the older FM Towns-specific software, why would you care about buying an FM Towns instead of any other IBM PC?
Fujitsu, just like NEC, made the transition to making standard Windows PCs and discontinued the FM Towns a couple years later.
The X68000 loses out in the CPU wars
Unlike the other two platforms, the X68000 had a different CPU and a distinct homegrown OS. It used the 68000 series of processors from Motorola, which were incredibly popular in the 80s and 90s. The same CPU was used by the Mac until the mid 90s, the Amiga, and a huge number of home consoles and arcade boards. It was a powerful CPU, but when every other platform was looking for a way to merge with the Windows platform, they had a big problem: you simply couldn't port Windows to the platform and get it to run regular Windows software because they didn't use the same CPUs. Sharp were locked out. While they also switched to making Windows PCs in the 90s, they had no way to bring their existing users with them by giving them a transition path.
The lure of multitasking
Why did Windows win out, though? In the west we often credit Microsoft Office as the killer app, but it wasn't a major player in Japan where Japanese language-specific word processors were huge in the market for years. I'd argue instead that multitasking was the killer feature.
In the DOS era, you ran one program at a time. You might have a lot of software you used, but you'd pick one program to use at a time. If you wanted to switch to something else, you'd have to save whatever you're doing, quit, and open a completely different full-screen app. While competing platforms like the Mac4 had multitasking via their GUIs for years, Windows and especially Windows 3 is what brought it to the wider market.
If you're going to be using more than one program at the same time, having a wider amount of software that's inter-compatible becomes more important. I'd argue that multitasking is what nudged market consolidation onto a smaller number of computers. Windows, and especially Windows 95, became very hard for other platforms to compete with because its base of software was just so large. It made far more sense for NEC and Fujitsu to bring Windows to their users even if it meant losing the lock-in that their unique OSs and platform-specific software had gotten them.
Shifts in the gaming market
In the 16-bit era, the FM Towns and X68000 were doing great in the computer gaming niche. They had powerful 2D gaming hardware and a lot of very sophisticated action games. Their original games and ports of arcade games compared extremely well against what 16-bit consoles could do, giving them a reputation of being the real gamers' platform. 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. Fujitsu and Sharp, meanwhile, just weren't releasing new hardware that could keep up. The PC gaming niche had already been shrinking and moving towards console for a few year, and this killed off a lot of what was left.
I also suspect that Sony's marketing for the PlayStation changed things significantly. Home computers had older players than the 16-bit consoles did, but Sony was marketing the PS1 towards those same older audiences. It probably made it pretty easy for computer players to look at the new consoles and decide to move on.
So, in conclusion
None of the 16-bit Japanese computer makers acutally died off - they just switched to making standard Windows PCs that were interchangeable with anything else out there. Microsoft took over that market just like they did everywhere else in the world, but at least the companies themselves survived better than the Commodores and Ataris of the world.
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Some of the 16-bit competitors, like Amiga and Atari ST, had some market penetration in North America, but they were pretty niche compared to Europe.
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There were some others too, like Sony NEWS, but they mostly settled into the "professional workstation market" that was its own weird thing. Just like the international SGI, Sun and NeXT workstations, they had their own reasons for fading away.
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A lot of the earlier Japanese Windows games I have list their system requirements in terms of both PC-98 and IBM PC, even though they're not using anything specific to either platform.
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Outside Japan the Amiga and many others also had high-quality multitasking GUIs for years, but I'm focusing specifically on Japan here.
