AX (Architecture eXtended) was a Japanese computing initiative starting in around 1986 to allow PCs to handle double-byte (DBCS) Japanese text via special hardware chips, whilst allowing compatibility with software written for foreign

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s. The idea was conceived by

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before he resigned his position as vice president of

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took over the project, and in July 1987 the Preparatory Committee of the AX Consortium started developing its specification. The AX Consortium officially started in October 1987, including

ASCII Corporation was a Japanese publishing company based in Chiyoda, Tokyo. It became a subsidiary of Kadokawa Group Holdings in 2004, and merged with another Kadokawa subsidiary MediaWorks (publisher), MediaWorks on April 1, 2008, becoming ASCII Media Works. T ...

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

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, etc., but notably excluding

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and

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(who were hence the 'opposition'). At that time,

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was the dominant PC architecture in the Japanese PC market because

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and its clone PCs could not display Japanese text. However, NEC did not tolerate PC-9801 compatible machines and was fighting court battles with

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which was the only PC-9801 compatible machine vendor. Therefore, other vendors desperately needed a standard specification for Japanese capable PCs. JEGA Video Adapter (Alps Electric)

To display

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characters with sufficient clarity, AX machines had screens with a resolution of 640x480 rather than the 640x350 standard EGA resolution prevalent elsewhere at the time. Users could typically switch between Japanese and English modes by typing 'JP' and 'US', which would also invoke the AX-BIOS and an

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enabling the input of Japanese characters. However, soon after the release of the AX, IBM released the

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can no ...

standard with which AX was obviously not compatible (they were not the only one promoting non-standard "super EGA" extensions). Consequently, the AX consortium had to design a compatible . AX-VGA/H was a hardware implementation with AX-BIOS, whereas AX-VGA/S was a software emulation. Due to less available software and its higher cost compared to the PC-9801 series, AX failed and was not able to break into the market in Japan. The Nikkei Personal Computing journal reported in 1989 that only 18 out of 36,165 PCs used in 937 companies were AX machines, and 90% of companies had no plan to purchase the AX machine. In 1990, IBM Japan unveiled

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which enabled IBM PC/AT and its clones to display Japanese text without any additional hardware using a standard VGA card. Soon after, AX disappeared and the decline of NEC PC-9801 began.

References

External links

Mitsubishi Maxy
(information from a Japanese computer museum)

(information from a Japanese computer museum) Graphics hardware Computer-related introductions in 1986 {{Compu-graphics-stub

See also

References

Further reading

External links