Japan leapt straight from handwriting to word processors, skipping the typewriter age
Western offices moved from typewriters to computers. Much of Japan never had the typewriter stage at all. With thousands of characters to handle, Japanese typewriters were a specialist's tool, so most documents were handwritten or run off on mimeograph machines until electronic word processors arrived around 1979 and swept the country.
The obstacle was sheer quantity. A Japanese typewriter operator had to hunt down and pick each character from a tray of more than a thousand metal slugs, slow work demanding real expertise. Kanji also need two bytes each in memory, so a key per symbol was out of the question. The fix was an input method: a series of keystrokes, with on-screen feedback, that narrows down to the desired character, still used on computers today.
Toshiba launched the first Japanese word processor, the JW-10, in February 1979 at 6.3 million yen, about 45,000 dollars, and the IEEE now lists it as a milestone. Oki followed in March with a kana keyboard system. Sharp, releasing its WD-3000 that September, took another route: almost no clerical workers could use a keyboard, so it offered a pen tablet instead, the industry's first, to get around what it called keyboard phobia.
Competition drove prices down fast. NEC and Fujitsu joined in 1980, when the average machine cost 2 million yen; by 1985 it was 164,000 yen, around 1,200 dollars. Because early office computers were too bulky to carry, these dedicated units stayed popular even after personal computers spread, and by the late 1980s ordinary households owned them. The nickname wapuro caught on in 1982 through a Fujitsu advertisement.
In English-speaking countries the story ran differently. Typewriters already did the job well, so costly dedicated machines never caught on widely, even the celebrated Wang systems of the 1970s. Many people jumped straight from a typewriter to software on a PC. The lineage reaches back to 1714, when Henry Mill patented a letter-transcribing machine.
Source: Word processor
