Projects and Activities of the IPSJ Computer History Committee - History of Computing: Learning from the Past - page 51

Since that time, the Computer History Committee continually maintained their ac-
tivities in many dimensions, wishing to transfer the precise historical record of what
took place in this country for newcomers in the information processing field. The
purpose of this short article is to report on our 40 years of work.
2 The History of Japanese Computers Series
The first volume of the series covered the material up to 1960, when computer re-
search emerged in universities, laboratories, as well as in a few industries. This vol-
ume included a number of parts. In one part, pioneering works were introduced; for
instance, switching theory in mid 1930's by Akira Nakajima, who worked with NEC,
the first generation computers like FUJIC (vacuum tubes, Fuji Photo Industry), pa-
rametron computer PC-1 [2], vacuum tube computer TAC (both at the University of
Tokyo) and others are explained. Programming technologies of those days are the
subjects of another part.
Following that, the second volume, “ The History of Japanese Computer Develop-
ment ” was published in 1998 covering the era from 1960 to 1980. As a matter of
course, it included many more commercial computers than the first volume. At the
time of publication, the first volume was completely sold out. Accordingly, a compact
disc containing the contents of the first volume was included in the second for the
readers' convenience.
The Committee is now in the midst of editing of the third volume, to be published
in 2010, commemorating the jubilee of the Society. The third volume covers facts of
time span 1980 to 2000. Among newly added topics are, for example, word proces-
sors, computer networks and the Internet. This volume is likely to become much
thicker than its predecessors.
3 The First Transactions
Much earlier than these topics, on the occasion of the 10th anniversary, IPSJ and the
first Computer History Committee planned to have a series of interviews of the com-
puter pioneers, to be included in the national historical archives, in order that those
precious achievements would not become vapour. The interviews came out in the
form of 10 articles and appeared in the IPSJ Magazine from 1974 to 1978. Topics
and authors with volumes and numbers are: FUJIC (B. Okazaki, 15 , 8), PC-1 (E.
Goto, 16 , 1), MUSASINO-1 (K. Takashima, 16 , 2), ETL Mark III and IV (S. Taka-
hashi, 17 , 2), ETL Mark I and II (Y. Komamiya, 17 , 6), NEC (H. Kaneda, 17, 9),
TAC (K. Murata, 18 , 3), Fujitsu (T. Matsuyama, 18 , 7), Oki (N. Sugiura, 19 , 5), and
Hitachi (T. Uraki, 19 , 8).
4 The Virtual Computer Museum
In the early 1990's, Professor S. Takahashi suggested opening a Virtual Computer
Museum on the Internet. The intent was to design new web pages showing many of