[hrktb]

You can look at Sharp or Toshiba building word processors, which were dedicated electronic appliances, but slowly moving to generic computers as they became cheap and good enough to manage complex input methods and non english character display (i.e. enough pixels per screen to have recognizable characters).

It's funny to think that the concept of a fully functional typewriter would be foreign to Japan until dedicated computers could be built.

[bbq]

Huh, that's interesting. Perhaps computing simply took the path of least resistance to express itself in society (for better or worse).