【Mitsubishi Electric】 MELCOM80 Japanese Language Series

This office computer from Mitsubishi Electric was announced in 1980. It was equipped with full-scale 24-dot kanji (Chinese character) processing for input, display and printing, and was designed to enable easy handling of daily used Japanese language containing a mixture of kanji and hiragana (Japanese phonetic letters).

In terms of Japanese characters, the system provided the 3,418 JIS level-1 characters as a basis, and additional 6,802 characters including JIS level-2 characters were available for use. A maximum of 35,000 characters could be handled, and special symbols including trademarks and corporate logos could be created as characters.

As basic software, Mitsubishi Electric developed DPS III -- a new operating system for Japanese language processing -- and this made it possible to provide directions to the operator in Japanese. The system used a high-density Japanese language display capable of displaying 1,000 24x24-dot kanji characters. The printer could print 24-dot characters in a Japanese common font "Minchotai" in various styles (such as vertical writing, horizontal wiring, vertically elongated characters and horizontally elongated characters) on postcards and other papers at a speed of 60 characters/second.

The central processing unit used the microprogramming system. Sixteen kilobit MOS LSI with a cycle time of 600 nanoseconds/2 bytes was used for the main memory unit, and maximum capacity was 512 kilobytes.

The system provided numerous methods for the input of Japanese language: by JIS character code from a numeric keypad, by MELCOM standard character code from typewriter keys, using a bar code reader, from a one-touch book or screen, from a pen-touch kanji character panel, or kana-to-kanji conversion.