If you enjoy the Commodore Show in London, you’ll love the Microcomputer Show ’89, which opened at the Tokyo Ryutsu Centre on May 10 with some 75 domestic and foreign companies participating in the four-day event – according to Newsbytes Japan, highlight of the show was to be found on the NEC stand the perfect Japanese answer to Stock, Aitken & Waterman, Bros and Brother Beyond – three robots calling themselves the Cybernetics Robot Band, controlled by a 32-bit microprocessors and three chord bashing away like mad; Mitsubishi Electric, Fujitsu, Sharp, Sony Tektronix, Nippon Motorola, Toshiba and NEC were all touting 32-bit microprocessors, with Mitsubishi and Fujitsu showing their contributions to the Gmicro family of chips optimised for the Tron operating system – Mitsubishi demonstrated four industrial robots, all controlled by Gmicro M32 microprocessors; Fujitsu was showing off a computer-aided design system combining a Sun-4 with its FMR personal computer running MS-DOS, and Matsushita Electric Industries was the proud exhibitor of a 64-bit RISC-type floating point processor, claiming that the sliver of silicon delivers 20M-FLOPS; those who wanted to see how simple brain circuits, like those to be found in the heads of Kylie Minogue fans, could gaze in wonder at Mitsubishi’s optical neuro circuit, demonstrated as part of a video display; and – at last – for those who send music publishers the words of their composition but say the tune is in their head, there was a new program for NEC’s PC-8800 that can transcribe the melody when you hum it into a microphone; all was to no avail however, and the punters stayed home in droves listening to their Kylie Minogue records, major exhibitors such as Intel Japan and IBM Japan failed to show, leading some analysts to mutter that the days for the show are likely numbered.
