Andrew Dunbar wrote:

>
>
> Perhaps I'm the only one here who didn't identify the
> abbreviations here right away. I've just looked them
> up: ATM = Adobe Type Manager, J/C/KLK = Japanese /
> Chinese / Korean Language Kit

I recognized it. I didn't want to go into the specifics because, well,
just because.

But I do know (because I magically had a CD with all of it) that the
release date of the various Mac Language Kits had nothing to do with
when they were developed, and there were maybe dozens of other kits or
localized versions developed that were never released (to my knowledge).
But I don't know all this "officially".

I think technically, they were attempts to pull what was already in the
localized versions (CJK anyway) and kludge them into the English system.
UI Strings stayed in English IIRC. But I don't recall the details.

John Jenkins might know more "officially".

>
> Those language kits were Macintosh specific.

True.

> I was
> pretty sure that various Japanese companies had
> already developed computers or at least word
> processors or other specialised data processing
> machines which could use the Japanese language
> before the American company Apple.

True, although Japan was a big market for Mac early on.

There were various Japanese _wapuro_ machines, there were PC machines
that were not quite up to the standards of US PCs nor were they unified
even in Japan, thus creating headaches for MS. Most ran at some point on
a modified version of DOS5. there was a version of Win3.0 in at least J
and K that I worked on as well.

When the Japanese market was finally standardized on the same HW
platform as everyone else was a red letter day indeed. That is why I
don't get why some here would be so quick to toss that and de
standardize keyboards

> Does anybody in
> this group know much about early Japanese computing?
>
> Early Chinese and Korean computers, if they exist
> would be even more interesing.

Korean and Chinese PCs were always the same as US ones, there were
differences only in the localized versions of DOS and Windows.

It may be interesting to note that it was MS (IIRC) that created the
SJIS encoding scheme -trading rarely used glyphs for previous escape
based string formats, or widely varying code point lengths of EUC.

Unicode would be the next innovation in string implementation after that.

Best,

Barry