So imagine you go out and buy a brand new laptop
today. Right. Just a standard laptop. Yeah. You
bring it home, you unbox it, turn it on, and
then you realize that because you speak English,
the computer is, well, it's functionally useless.
Oh, wow. OK. Right. To actually read your native
language on the screen, you're forced to go back
to the store and buy a specific, wildly expensive,
completely different brand of hardware. I mean,
that sounds completely absurd to us now. Exactly,
because today, language is just this invisible
software toggle, right? You go into your settings,
you pick French or Arabic or Japanese, and the
whole interface just instantly transforms. Yeah,
it's totally frictionless. We just kind of take
it for granted that any hardware can display
any language on Earth. But if you step back into
the world of 1980s personal computing and specifically
in Japan, that invisible software toggle was,
I mean, it was practically science fiction. Oh
yeah, it really was. To read your own language,
you were held hostage by one company's physical
hardware monopoly. So today, we're doing a deep
dive into how a secret spare time software project
inside IBM Japan called DOSV changed all of that.
Such a wild story. It really is. We're looking
at how this project not only solved a massive
linguistic engineering problem, but like accidentally
detonated a national computing monopoly and forced
the entire Japanese market to open up to the
world. It's honestly one of the most fascinating
examples in tech history of software just brute
forcing a hardware problem. Okay, let's unpack
this because before we can understand a solution
We have to understand why displaying Japanese
on a computer was such a total nightmare in the
1980s, right? So we have to look at the physics
of early computers They were built by English
speakers for English speaker, which means the
architecture was Pretty limited very limited
I mean the English alphabet plus numbers and
some basic punctuation totals about 128 characters
and in computing terms That is incredibly lightweight.
You can represent any of those characters with
just seven bits of data. So that easily fits
into a single byte. Just a standard single byte
character. Exactly. And beyond just the storage
space, think about the visual rendering. Drawing
a capital A or lowercase e on a screen requires
this really simple tiny grid of pixels. Just
a few dots, really. Yeah. And the rudimentary
processors of the late 70s and early 80s, they
could handle that minimal graphic processing
without breaking a sweat. But then you have the
Japanese language, which relies on kanji. Right.
And we aren't talking about 100 characters here.
We're talking about thousands of incredibly complex,
intricate glyphs. So single byte goes right out
the window. Instantly. Yeah. Just to assign a
unique digital ID. to every single kanji character,
you immediately have to move to double byte characters.
Which doubles the memory requirement right off
the bat. It does. But honestly, that was just
the identification part. The real bottleneck
was the graphics. Drawing the actual characters.
Exactly. To make a complex kanji character legible
on a monitor, you can't use a simple pixel grid.
You need a dense 16 by 16, or even a 24 by 24
pixel matrix. Oh wow, so it's a huge jump in
visual data. Massive. If an early 80s computer
tried to calculate and draw those thousands of
dense pixel grids on the fly just using pure
software, the processor would practically melt
down. It was just too much. So they couldn't
use software. They had to create a physical workaround,
right? Yeah, since the processor couldn't draw
the text fast enough, they baked the characters
physically into the motherboard itself. Literally
hardware chips. Yep. They used specialized ROM
chips, read -only memory. They were preloaded
with a drawn Kanji bitmaps. So when you typed,
the computer wasn't computing a shape at all?
No, not at all. It was essentially just rubber
stamping a physical image from that chip directly
onto the screen. And I guess whoever controls
that specialized physical hardware controls the
market. That's exactly what happened. Because
of this requirement, a Japanese company named
NEC completely cornered the landscape with their
proprietary PC -98 architecture. The PC -98.
That was the behemoth, right? Oh, absolutely.
It had the Kanji ROM chips built right in, and
it dominated. I mean, if you wanted to run a
business or write a document in Japan, you bought
a PC -98. It was a perfectly sealed, highly profitable
walled garden. 100%. And meanwhile, you have
IBM, right? This company dominating the entire
rest of the globe with the standard IBM PC. Yeah,
everywhere else, they're the kings. But they're
staring at the third largest economy in the world
and realizing they are essentially locked out.
And their attempts to break in were just, I mean,
it was a master class in corporate self -sabotage.
They certainly did not make it easy on themselves.
Not at all. First, they released the IBM 5550.
And technically, It was a beast, right? Oh yeah.
It had the Kanji ships, it read high quality
fonts, and it displayed them at a massive resolution
of 1024 by 768. But the price, the price was
so astronomical that only massive enterprise
clients who already owned IBM mainframes could
afford it. Yeah, regular consumers couldn't even
look at a 5550. So IBM panics and they try to
build a consumer friendly machine to compete
with NEC. They create the IBM JX. And this is
where the strategy just completely unraveled.
It's unbelievable. IBM deliberately crippled
the JX. They took the Intel 8086 processor, which
was the standard of the day. with a 16 -bit data
bus, and they swapped it out for the older Intel
8088. Which is a really crucial technical downgrade.
Explain why that matters so much. Well, the 8088
still processed data internally at 16 bits, but
its external data bus, the pathway it uses to
communicate with the rest of the computer, was
only eight bits wide. I read this great analogy
in the source. It's like dropping a massive V8
engine into a sports car, but then forcing all
the exhaust through a cocktail straw. That is
exactly what it was like. It choked the entire
system. And IBM did this intentionally. They
deliberately neutered their consumer machine
purely so it wouldn't be fast enough to compete
with their wildly expensive 5550 enterprise machine.
Yeah, they were terrified of cannibalizing their
own high end sales. It's just wild. They protected
their margins, but they destroyed their reputation.
Exactly. The JX was sluggish. Consumers hated
it. And software developers practically boycotted
it because IBM was being so uncooperative with
the architecture. So by trying to protect a niche,
high -end product, IBM basically guaranteed that
NEC's PC -98 kept its iron grip on the mainstream
market. They handed the market to NEC on a silver
platter. So hardware isn't working. The corporate
strategy is a total mess. The only way forward
is to rethink the basic physics of the problem,
which brings us to 1987. And to a developer at
the IBM Yamato Development Laboratory named Masai
Kiko Hattori. Right. And Hattori is the perfect
person for this because he actually worked on
the doomed JX project. Yeah, he spent years in
the trenches dealing with a nightmare of trying
to localize Western hardware for Japanese users
and in his spare time at the lab he starts looking
at the horizon of global computing. And he realizes
two massive shifts are happening at the same
time. Right. What's fascinating here is how he
connected the dots. First, the video graphics
array, the VGA card, had just been introduced,
which made 640 by 48080 resolution a global standard.
OK, so better graphics? Yes. And second, the
new Intel 386 processors were hitting the market,
bringing a true 32 -bit architecture. So a lot
more speed. And what does that mean for Japanese
text? Well, Hattori hypothesizes that with a
VGA card's visual capabilities plus the sheer
raw calculating speed of the 386 processor, a
computer finally has enough brute force to just
bypass the physical ROM chips entirely. Wait,
so you could just draw the kanji fonts via software?
Exactly. Loading them straight from the hard
disk into memory, drawing them on the fly. Which
means you don't need proprietary Japanese hardware
anymore. No ROM chips needed. You could just
use the exact same... cheap globally standard
IBM PC clones that someone in New York or London
was using and just force it to speak Japanese.
That was the theory anyway. But theory and execution
are very different. Right. Because drawing double
-byte text entirely through software on a 1980s
processor was agonizingly slow. Agonizing. The
lag between hitting a key and the kanji character
actually appearing on screen was totally unacceptable
for a typist. I love this detail from the source.
Hattori actually kept a stopwatch on his desk
during the entire development phase. Just constantly
timing the delay. Yeah, the team was obsessively
timing the rendering process, trying to shave
milliseconds off the text drawing software so
it would feel natural to a human typing at full
speed. They had to make it imperceptible. But
hold on, I have a massive problem with this timeline.
Oh, let's hear it. So if we're in 1987, right,
VGA cards and 386 processors are brand new, bleeding
edge tech. Oh, yeah. they were top of the line.
Which means they were prohibitively expensive.
So wasn't Hattori just building another IBM 5550,
like another machine that was technically brilliant,
but that no average consumer in Japan could actually
afford? You know, that is exactly the trap IBM
management thought he was falling into. They
looked at the cost of those components and thought
the project was financially useless. Because
no one would buy it. But Hattori was banking
on the sheer gravitational pull of the global
market. He wasn't building software for 1987,
he was skating to where the puck was going. Ah,
okay, building for the early 90s. Exactly. He
knew that because the entire planet was adopting
VGA and the 386, economies of scale would force
the prices of those components to just plummet.
So it's like designing the elevator systems for
a skyscraper before the upper floors have even
been constructed. That's a great way to put it.
He knew the global hardware would eventually
catch up to his software. And that software became
known as DOSV. Right. Now, just a quick clarification
on the name for you listening. DOSV stands for
Disk Operating System slash VGA. The V is for
VGA, not the Roman numeral five. Yeah, even though
it coincidentally launched around the same time
as MS -DOS version 5, the V is strictly for the
graphics. Good to know. So Hattori and his team
have a working prototype. They proved software
can beat hardware. But the biggest threat to
this project wasn't NEC, was it? No, not at all.
It was their own colleagues at IBM. Because DSV
worked Almost too well. Way too well. It was
initially designed just to run on IBM's own localized
machines in Japan, but because the underlying
code was built to interface with standard VGA
hardware, Early users and testers quietly realized
something really explosive. And this is the part
that terrified IBM. Right. You could take a floppy
disk with Diaz V, stick it into a completely
generic, cheap PC clone made by an American company
like Gateway, for example, and it would run flawless
Japanese. Which means IBM loses its hardware
monopoly. Hattori and his team actually had to
hide this fact from the rest of the company.
When word leaked out, 80 % of the staff at the
Yamato office opposed the DoSV project. 80%.
They were furious. Because if DoSV allowed cheap
global clones to enter the Japanese market, no
one would ever buy IBM's expensive proprietary
enterprise machines again. It is the ultimate
innovator's dilemma. The established divisions
would rather protect a shrinking slice of a proprietary
pie than risk their margins to open up the entire
market. But Hattori's bosses, the Chomu Maruyama
and Nobumi, they saw the bigger picture. Yeah,
they realized Japan was isolating itself. They
knew IBM had to cannibalize its own hardware
advantage to establish a new open Japanese standard
based on the global architecture. And that realization
led to an unbelievable corporate showdown in
December 1990. Maruyama takes his pitch, which
was titled, The Low -End PC Strategy in Japan,
straight to IBM's Management Committee. Now standard
operating procedure at this executive committee
is incredibly strict. You get exactly 15 minutes.
Right. You make your pitch, they say yes or no,
and you leave. But Maruyama knew 15 minutes wasn't
nearly enough to convince a hardware company
to essentially just give away its hardware advantage.
So he just didn't leave. He didn't. He dug in
and fought for his life for an entire hour, debating
the executives until IBM CEO John Akers finally
relented and approved the strategy. Wow. An hour
long standoff. So they get the green light. But
getting corporate approval is just. politics.
True. The actual physics of forcing an English
-first architecture to render thousands of complex
kanji without crashing the system. That's where
the real trick lies. How did they actually buffer
all that data? Well, they built a truly ingenious
software architecture that relied on three specific
drivers. These drivers acted as translators between
the operating system and the hardware. OK, what
was the first one? The first was called UF -ONT
.SYS. The font driver. Exactly. Instead of pulling
from a physical ROM chip, F -O -N -T .S -Y -S
grabbed the massive file of Japanese glyphs from
the hard drive and loaded the entire set directly
into the computer's extended memory. So the raw
visual data was just always sitting there, ready
to be accessed instantly. Yep. But getting it
from memory to the screen is the dangerous part.
Which brings us to DSP .S -Y -S, the display
driver. And this is the sleight of hand that
really made DOS V work, right? It really is.
Standard DOS expects to handle simple single
byte text. If you try to force raw, complex graphical
bitmaps directly into the video memory, the system
panics. It just crashes. Right. So DSP .SYS creates
a tiny 20 kilobyte chunk of memory and calls
it a simulated video buffer. So it's essentially
a safe staging area. Exactly. Whenever a program
wanted to write Japanese text, it dumped the
character codes into this simulated sandbox.
The driver would fetch the heavy bitmaps from
the font memory. paint the complex Japanese characters
inside this safe 20 kilobyte buffer, and then,
only when it was perfectly rendered, it would
blitz the finished image over to the actual video
memory to be displayed. So it's tricking the
hardware. The computer thinks it's just handling
routine data transfers, completely unaware it's
rendering complex foreign languages. It's a brilliant
workaround. Yeah. And the final piece was IAS
.SYS, the input assist subsystem. What did that
do? It sat at the front end, it allows you to
type phonetically on a standard keyboard, and
it would dynamically convert those keystrokes
into the correct kanji characters on the screen.
But, you know, whenever you use software to trick
hardware, you are going to expose flaws in the
physical manufacturing. Oh, absolutely. And DoSV
exposed a massive one regarding how cheap hardware
handled scrolling. Yes. This is fascinating.
Early versions of DoSV caused catastrophic failures
on certain generic PC clones, specifically those
using a very popular cheap graphics controller
made by Sing Labs. What kind of failure? Well,
if you tried to scroll down a page of text, the
screen would violently tear, turning the Japanese
characters into completely unreadable garbage.
Oh, gross. Why did that happen? To understand
why, you have to look at how different languages
move on a screen. When Western software scrolls
English text, It's just shifting tiny lightweight
text strings around in the memory. It's incredibly
fast. Right, because it's single byte. Exactly.
Yeah. But scrolling massive, dense, kanji graphics
requires moving a tremendous amount of data.
If the software tries to manually move all those
heavy tixels every time you hit the down arrow,
the screen refreshes while the memory is only
half updated. Which causes that terrible visual
tear. Right. So how do you avoid the tear? You
use a hardware trick called CRTC address wraparound.
CRTC stands for Cathode Ray Tube Controller.
Okay. Instead of forcing the software to physically
move millions of pixels in memory, the CRTC wraparound
simply changes the hardware pointer that tells
the monitor where the top of the screen is. Oh,
I see. It's like having a giant physical painting
and instead of repainting the entire canvas every
time you want to look at a lower section, you
just like physically pan the camera down. That
is a perfect analogy. Hardware scrolling is seamless.
But here's the catch. Western software practically
never needed to hardware scroll heavy graphics.
Oh, no. So what did the manufacturers do? Well,
the manufacturers of these cheap generic VGA
clones like Sang Labs, they just cut corners.
They didn't wire the CRTC wrap around correctly
because nobody in America or Europe was using
it. They bolted the camera to the floor because
they assumed you'd never need to pan it. Exactly.
It wasn't until DoSV came along and stressed
the hardware in this highly specific localized
way that the manufacturing flaw was exposed.
Wow. And IBM actually had to write a patch for
this, right? In a later version, they added a
special command line, switch slash HS equals
LC, just to bypass the broken hardware in those
specific graphics cards. It was incredibly messy
trying to force global hardware to adapt locally.
And clunky. I mean, earlier versions of localized
DOS were heavily marketed as being bilingual,
boasting an English mode and a Japanese mode.
Yeah, but to switch between them? You literally
had to reboot the entire computer. You couldn't
just toggle it. Not very user friendly. No. But
despite the glitches, the screen tearing, and
the weird reboots, Mariamma's promise to the
executives held true. DOSV worked. It did. And
it completely shattered the Japanese computing
landscape. The barrier to entry overnight went
from build a billion dollar proprietary factory
in Japan to install this software on a generic
machine. And IBM didn't hoard this advantage
either. They actively open sourced the revolution.
Right. Microsoft Japan immediately saw the potential.
Their executive, Susumu Furukawa, met with IBM
and acquired the source code for DOSV. And then
in December 1990, IBM founds the OA DG. the PC
Open Architecture Developers Group specifically
to promote this new global standard across Japan.
And the invasion was staggering. Between 1992
and 1994, generic PC clones just flooded the
market. Global heavyweights like Compaq and Dell,
who'd been locked up for a decade, suddenly arrived
in force. The gravitational pull was so intense
that even the massive domestic Japanese giants
gave up. I mean, Fujitsu had spent years pushing
their own proprietary architecture called FM
Towns. Right. They completely abandoned it and...
pivoted to making their own DSV generic clones.
People across Japan just started calling these
generic machines DOSV PESECOM. DOSV personal
computers. Exactly. And the final fatal blow
to NEC's PC -98 monopoly came as global hardware
just kept getting faster. IBM releases the ThinkPad
laptop and the PSV desktop. And NEC tries to
fight back with a new machine called the PC -9821.
But their marketing is so desperate at this point,
their big advertising flex was bragging that
their proprietary machine could scroll a specific
word processor, Ichitaro, slightly faster than
IBM's machine. Yeah, when you are reduced to
bragging about the scroll speed of a single application,
you have already lost the war on architecture.
Totally. An IBM executive named Yuzuru Takamura
summed it up perfectly at the time. He pointed
out that graphical interfaces like Windows were
the inevitable future. Global processors and
generic graphics cards were going to see exponential
leaps in speed and massive drops in price purely
because the entire world was buying them. So
what does this all mean? It means you can't out
-innovate the combined R &D budget of the entire
planet. Exactly. Tokimura knew that if NEC's
PC -98 continued using an isolated proprietary
motherboard, it would eventually be crushed by
the sheer momentum of global standardization.
Because Windows was built for the global PC standard.
Adapting Windows to NEC's proprietary hardware
was a nightmare, but for DoSV, you just supplied
the kanji as a software font. And he was entirely
right. By the time Windows 95 launched, the underlying
battle of the operating systems was over. Windows
absorbed the linguistic capability seamlessly.
Both NEC's hardware monopoly and DoSV itself
faded into the background. But DoSV had already
won the war. It permanently globalized the Japanese
computing market. It is such a profound legacy.
A developer sitting in a lab with a stock watch,
hiding his results from his own colleagues, manages
to brute force a hardware monopoly into submission,
and opens an entire nation to global standards.
It really is. And, you know, it leaves us with
a fascinating principle to consider today. DoSV
proved that if you have enough raw processing
power, you can simulate incredibly complex proprietary
physical hardware entirely in software. Software
always eats hardware. eventually. Precisely.
Look at the walled gardens we deal with today.
We have smartphones with heavily locked proprietary
ecosystems. We have exclusive gaming consoles.
We have highly specialized VR headsets. Right.
As our processors become unimaginably powerful
over the next decade, what happens to those physical
monopolies? Oh wow. What happens when the next
generation's equivalent of DOS V figures out
how to emulate all of their proprietary physical
features purely in software on completely generic,
off -the -shelf hardware. That is a brilliant
thought to end on. The walls of today's tech
ecosystems might seem impossibly high, but someone
is always in a lab with a stopwatch, figuring
out how to build a software ladder right over
them. As you go about your day interacting with
all your frictionless devices, remember the invisible
battles that made them possible. We will catch
you next time on The Deep Dive.