IBM Kanji System

IBM Kanji System was announced in 1979 to support Japanese language processing on the IBM System/360 computers. It was later enhanced by the support of IBM 5550 and DOS/V.

General

The IBM Kanji System was announced in September, 1979, to support Japanese language processing on the IBM System/360 Until that time, the IBM host computer systems in Japan were able to process only the English alphanumeric characters and Japanese half-width Katakana characters.

This announcement in 1979 included the following items:

Hardware

• Offline input/output
  • IBM 5924 T01 Kanji Keypunch (IBM 029 Key Punch with Kanji keyboard}
• Online terminals
  • IBM 3270 Subsystem
    • IBM 3274 model 52C Control Unit with Kanji keyboad
    • IBM 3278 model 52 Display
    • IBM 3273 model 52 Inkjet Printer
• Online printer
  • IBM 3800-2 Printing Subsystem

Kanji support software

• Operating Systems
  • OS/VS1
  • DOS/VSE
  • IBM 8100 DPPX
• Development Languages
  • COBOL
  • PL/I
• DBCS support
  • IMS
  • CICS
• Utility programs

It was later in 1984 enhanced with the support of the IBM 3270 emulation and IBM 5250 emulation by the Japanese PCs, IBM 5550 in 1984 and DOS/V in 1991.

Effect to the support of other languages

Similar supports became later available for Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese languages.

See also

• Japanese language
• Kanji
• DBCS
• CJK characters
• Other DBCS langauages: Korean, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese languages
• List of IBM products