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The article discusses the history of supercomputers, or high-speed computers. U.S. engineer Seymour Cray was a pioneer in this field in the 1970's. The first real supercomputer was the Cray-1 introduced in 1976. By the 1980's growing numbers of supercomputers were made by the Japanese companies Fujitsu, Hitachi, and NEC. An NEC machine surpassed the Cray computers as the world's fastest computer in the 1980's. The end of the supercomputer era in the U.S. came in the 1990's, due in part to the end of the Cold War. Japan stopped producing the machines due to an economic recession in the country.

In this article, the editor shares his experience of his trip to Japan whereby he mentions that this issue explores some of the issues that needed to be addressed in adapting the computer to Japan. Three articles, by Kurt Hensch and his colleagues, discuss the technical problems that had to be solved to allow IBM computers to handle Japanese characters. There was no easy solution, as the Japanese language could not be captured in a simple character set such as ASCII. Before jumping into the details of Japanese character sets, this issue begins with an article on plug-compatible computers by Shigeru Takahashi. Japanese companies were leaders in developing computers that used instruction sets from existing designs. These machines let users run software written for other brands of computers, as an activity that raised many new problems over software rights. Friedrich W. Kistermann about the Hollerith punched card machines of the 1900s. This is not an article about Japan, but it does deal with problems that are similar to those described in other articles in this issue.