【Oki Electric Industry】 OKITACsystem9Series

In 1976, Oki Electric marketed the OKITACsystem9 Models 3/5/7 as true office computers. This series was developed to achieve features like low-cost, ultra small size, simple operation and high performance. Oki developed two types of display for achieving interactive operation, a panel display (P) type and a character display (C) type, and two types of keyboard layouts, the JIS layout and the "a-i-u-e-o" layout, so customers could combine these to suit the intended application and operator skill. The Series provided multi-job/multi-task operation, and was highly praised by office computer users due to its use of BPL (Business Programming Language), an easy language for business processing, and its full lineup of job and industry specific packages. In the area of packaged software, on the other hand, innovations were developed to achieve optimization according to the nature of the user task, and with this Series, packages for swimming schools were a hit product.

To reduce data input work, the OKITACsystem9 Pen Touch Series (marketed in 1979) was equipped with a book device where items on each page were touched with a pen. This eliminated the need to perform keyboard input of field code numbers, and a "cordless" design made it possible to directly input customer data on the spot, while receiving it over the telephone. The system was used in a wide range of specific industries including automobile repair, liquor sales and medical care. This series inherited the sheet slide keyboard, which continued until the OKITACsystemA Series which came later.