IPSJ 75th National Convention at Tohoku University

The Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ) held its 75th national convention at Tohoku University in Sendai, Miyagi, Japan, from 6-8 March 2013. Although the university was heavily affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake on 11 March 2011 and temporary houses still exist in the campus, the convention was a great success, with a total of 2,800 attendees.

Convention Highlights

David Alan Grier, IEEE Computer Society president and former editor in chief of the Annals, was invited to the convention, and he delivered a keynote speech titled, "Crowdsourcing: Social Computing and the New Methods of Computer Science," on the afternoon of 6 March (see Figure 3). The lecture hall was full, and the speech was well accepted and appreciated because crowd-sourcing is new in Japan and most people hadn't heard of it before. After the keynote, Grier had meetings with the IPSJ President Kazuo Furukawa and members of the IPSJ Board of Directors and History Committee. They introduced each society's activities and discussed future cooperation.

The next day Grier visited the Cyber-science Center at Tohoku University and toured supercomputers in operation and artifacts in the display room where modules of the SENAC-1 (SENdai Automatic Computer-1) Parametron computer and historic mainframes, supercomputers cabinets, and an Earth Simulator node are exhibited. The room was certified as an IPSJ Satellite Museum of Historical Computers in 2010.

Figure 3.

IEEE Computer Society President David Alan Grier delivers the keynote at 2013 IPSJ National Convention at Tohoku University in Sendai.

The convention also held a "Poetry and Truth from Japanese Computer Pioneers' Life" session. Yoshio Miyagi, who was responsible for the development of NEC computers, spoke about how computer development promoted the progress of semiconductor technology in the early days. Masatoshi Shima, who worked at Busicom, Intel, and Zilog, talked about his experiences designing the Intel 4004, 8080, and Z80 microprocessors.

5th Information Processing Technology Heritage Certification Ceremony

During the national convention, IPSJ also held its 5th Information Processing (IP) Technology Heritage Certification Ceremony. This time the following were certified as IP Technology Heritage artifacts:

• • Tide Predictor (Légé UK, 1957)

• • FACOM 201 Parametron Computer (Fujitsu, 1960)

• • MADIC IIA Transistor Computer System (Matsushita Communication Industrial [now, Panasonic Mobile Communications], 1963)

• • Tokyo Olympic Information System related materials (IBM Japan, 1964)

• • USAC-1010 Office Computer (Unoke Electronic Industries [now, PFU], 1966)

• • Wire Dot Printer (Oki Electric, 1968)

• • MARS-105 JR Seat Reservation System Terminal (Hitachi, 1975)

• • MZ-80K Personal Computer (Sharp, 1978-1980)

Manufacturer's names and manufacturing years are listed in parentheses following the item.

MADIC-IIA is a transistorized small scientific computer developed in 1961 and was the first commercial computer from Matsushita (now, Panasonic). It used dynamic flip-flop circuits based on a single transistor for logic circuits and a magnetic drum made by Matsushita for internal memory (see Figure 4). It was also equipped with a hardware floating-point unit. By using the binary serial arithmetic system and arranging registers on the magnetic drum, it greatly reduced the component count and achieved higher reliability, greater compactness, and lower cost. It also realized a small-sized computer and improved the operability. A complete system including peripheral devices has been preserved at Wakayama University in Wakayama where Konosuke Matsushita, the founder of Matsushita, was born.

Figure 4.

Panasonic's first commercial computer MADIC-IIA built in 1963 is exhibited at Wakayama University in Wakayama.

Figure 5.

Sharp's 8-bit microcomputer kit built in late 1970s is exhibited at the KCG Computer Museum, Kyoto Computer Gakuin in Kyoto.

MZ-80K is a training kit for 8-bit microcomputers released by Sharp in 1978. It was an all-in-one personal computer equipped with a CRT display, keyboard, and cassette deck (see Figure 5). Instead of equipping a BASIC interpreter stored in a ROM, MZ-80K adopted a system to load an interpreter from a cassette tape to RAM (what they called a Clean Computer System) that allowed the use...