PC Open Architecture Developers' Group

Last updated April 30, 2019

PC Open Architecture Developers' Group (OADG, Japanese: PCオープン・アーキテクチャー推進協議会) is a consortium of the major Japanese personal computer manufacturers. Sponsored by IBM during the 1990s, it successfully guided Japan's personal computer manufacturing companies at that time into standardising to an IBM PC-compatible and open architecture.

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. The company began in 1911, founded in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924.

A personal computer (PC) is a multi-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and price make it feasible for individual use. Personal computers are intended to be operated directly by an end user, rather than by a computer expert or technician. Unlike large costly minicomputer and mainframes, time-sharing by many people at the same time is not used with personal computers.

Open architecture is a type of computer architecture or software architecture intended to make adding, upgrading, and swapping components easy. For example, the IBM PC, Amiga 500 and Apple IIe have an open architecture supporting plug-in cards, whereas the Apple IIc computer has a closed architecture. Open architecture systems may use a standardized system bus such as S-100, PCI or ISA or they may incorporate a proprietary bus standard such as that used on the Apple II, with up to a dozen slots that allow multiple hardware manufacturers to produce add-ons, and for the user to freely install them. By contrast, closed architectures, if they are expandable at all, have one or two "expansion ports" using a proprietary connector design that may require a license fee from the manufacturer, or enhancements may only be installable by technicians with specialized tools or training.

History

Before the advent of the IBM PC in 1981 in the United States, there were many different varieties and designs of personal computer. Examples from that era include the Tandy RadioShack and Commodore. These machines were each based upon a different computer architecture and the software programs that ran on them were compatible only with the machine they had been designed for. In Japan, except for the MSX, this situation continued well into the early 1990s, because three of Japan's major electronics manufacturers (NEC, Sharp and Fujitsu) had also designed their own unique personal computers; although NEC with its NEC 9801 was at that time the most successful.^[1]

RadioShack, formerly RadioShack Corporation, is the trade name of an American retailer founded in 1921. Since 2017, General Wireless Operations, Inc. has leased the name from Kensington Capital Holdings and operates primarily as an e-commerce website, a network of approximately 425 independently owned authorized dealer stores, and as a supplier of parts for HobbyTown. All stores are located in the United States.

Commodore International was an American home computer and electronics manufacturer founded by Jack Tramiel. Commodore International (CI), along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Machines (CBM), participated in the development of the home–personal computer industry in the 1970s and 1980s. The company developed and marketed the world's best-selling desktop computer, the Commodore 64 (1982), and released its Amiga computer line in July 1985. With quarterly sales ending 1983 of $49 million, Commodore was one of the world's largest personal computer manufacturers.

MSX is a standardized home computer architecture, announced by Microsoft on June 16, 1983. It was conceived and marketed by Kazuhiko Nishi, then vice-president at Microsoft Japan and director at ASCII Corporation. Nishi conceived the project as an attempt to create unified standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period.

The American computer manufacturer IBM had entered the Japanese market with its own IBM 5550 computer. Japanese-language-capable computers at the time, however, had special requirements in terms of processor capability and screen size, and IBM's JX project, emphasizing compatibility with the IBM PC, enjoyed limited success. The whole situation was felt by many to be hindering the healthy growth of the Japanese computer industry, particularly since domestic and overseas software vendors had to develop, test and support many different software programs to run on the many different kinds of personal computers sold in Japan.

IBM 5550 is a personal computer series that IBM marketed in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China in the 1980s and 1990s, for business use customers. In Japan, it was introduced in 1983 and promoted as "Multistation 5550" because it had three roles in one machine: a PC, a word processing machine which was traditionally marketed as a machine different from a PC in Japan, and an IBM-host attached terminal.

The IBM JX was a personal computer released in 1984 into the Japanese, Australian and New Zealand markets. Designed in Japan, it was based on the technology of the IBM PCjr and was designated the IBM 5511. It was targeted in the Australasian market towards the public education sector rather than at consumers, and was sold in three levels: JX (64 KiB), JX2 (128 KiB) and JX3 (256 KiB). Upgrades were available to both 384 KiB and 512 KiB.

IBM developed the operating software DOS/V in Japan, and licensed it to other Japanese PC manufacturers. To promote the IBM PC architecture on which DOS/V worked, IBM sponsored a consortium which was named the PC Open Architecture Developers' Group (OADG) in 1991 and made public its internal architecture and interfaces.^[2] At the height of this enterprise, the consortium included amongst its members the major Japanese PC manufactures, such as Toshiba and Hitachi, and overseas manufacturers such as Acer of Taiwan and Dell of the United States. Together, they not only strove to develop a unified architecture, but also produced a number of DOS/V-compatible application software programs and participated in the major computer shows. By the time Microsoft's computer operating system Windows 95 had arrived in 1995, the IBM PC architecture, using DOS/V, was already a predominant force in Japan.

DOS/V was a Japanese computing initiative starting in 1990 to allow DOS on IBM PC compatibles with VGA cards to handle double-byte (DBCS) Japanese text via software alone. It was developed by IBM for its PS/55 machines. Kanji fonts and other locale information were stored on the hard disk rather than on special chips as in the preceding AX architecture. As with AX, its great value for the Japanese computing industry was in allowing compatibility with foreign software. This had not been possible under NEC's proprietary PC-98 system, which was the market leader before DOS/V emerged. DOS/V stands for "Disk Operating System/VGA".

Toshiba Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Its diversified products and services include information technology and communications equipment and systems, electronic components and materials, power systems, industrial and social infrastructure systems, consumer electronics, household appliances, medical equipment, office equipment, as well as lighting and logistics.

Hitachi, Ltd. is a Japanese multinational conglomerate company headquartered in Chiyoda, Tokyo, Japan. It is the parent company of the Hitachi Group and forms part of the DKB Group of companies. Hitachi is a highly diversified company that operates eleven business segments: Information & Telecommunication Systems, Social Infrastructure, High Functional Materials & Components, Financial Services, Power Systems, Electronic Systems & Equipment, Automotive Systems, Railway & Urban Systems, Digital Media & Consumer Products, Construction Machinery and Other Components & Systems.

Members

In 2003, membership included the following companies:

Sharp Corporation is a Japanese multinational corporation that designs and manufactures electronic products, headquartered in Sakai-ku, Sakai. Since 2016 it has been a subsidiary of Taiwan-based Foxconn Group. Sharp employs more than 50,000 people worldwide. The company was founded in September 1912 in Tokyo and takes its name from one of its founder’s first inventions, the Ever-Sharp mechanical pencil, which was invented by Tokuji Hayakawa in 1915.

Fujitsu Ltd. is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. In 2015, it was the world's fourth-largest IT services provider measured by IT services revenue. Fortune named Fujitsu as one of the world's most admired companies and a Global 500 company.

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References

↑ Boyd, John (April 1997). "From Chaos to Competition - Japan's PC industry in transformation". Computing Japan Magazine. Archived from the original on 2017-01-16. Retrieved 2017-01-16.
↑ Myers, Steven; Smith, Greg (March 1995). "DOS/V: The Soft(ware) Solution to Hard(ware) Problems". Computing Japan Magazine. Archived from the original on 2017-01-15. Retrieved 2017-01-15.

External links

PC Open Architecture Developers' Group (former official web site)
Free Standards Group OADG is a member of the Free Standards Group.

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[Boyd_1997-1] Boyd, John (April 1997). "From Chaos to Competition - Japan's PC industry in transformation". Computing Japan Magazine. Archived from the original on 2017-01-16. Retrieved 2017-01-16.

[Myers_1995-2] Myers, Steven; Smith, Greg (March 1995). "DOS/V: The Soft(ware) Solution to Hard(ware) Problems". Computing Japan Magazine. Archived from the original on 2017-01-15. Retrieved 2017-01-15.