Nippon Electric Company

At the end of the nineteenth century, the Nippon Electric Company was founded in 1899 by Kunihiko Iwadare in cooperation with the Western Electric Company of the U.S. to become the first Japanese joint venture with foreign capital. Eventually Nippon Electric Company grew to become the manufacturing arm of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, just as Western Electric Company grew to become the manufacturing arm of American Telephone and Telegraph. Telephones and switching systems were the bread and butter of these companies, and while NEC and Western Electric enjoyed boomtimes during the manufacturing age, NTT and AT&T similarly reaped a bountiful financial harvest from the cables carrying all these telephone calls......

After I resigned from AT&T Bell Labs, I worked at a telecommunications start-up focusing on voice-response systems for the financial and trucking industries. Going from the world's premier research and development organization to a struggling startup proved to be too much of a culture shock, and I soon found myself hired at NEC. When I first arrived, NEC had several U.S. divisions affectionately known as "the seven sisters" involved in different computer and communications and technology endeavors. I had the privilege of working in the computer division known as NEC Information Systems, Inc. where we developed big iron, minicomputers and PCs. A couple of years later, we merged with the home electronics division to form NEC Technologies, Inc. and focused only on PCs.....

The Astra XL product family ran on an NEC variant of System V Unix called Astrix, and used the Motorola 68020, 68030, and 68040 family of microprocessors as their central processing units (CPU). The BusinessMate product family had the capability of running DOS and Windows, but also ran SCO Xenix or SCO Unix System V Release 2 and used the Intel 80386 and then the 80486 microprocessors as their CPUs. When I first arrived at NEC, my role was to teach NEC engineers and our customers' engineers everything I knew about NEC's flavor of Unix - Astrix and our customized versions of SCO Xenix and SCO Unix. I developed course curricula that was useful on all the hardware platforms. It was fun flying all around the U.S., Canada, and Central America talking to engineers about what I was passionate about - Writing Unix Device Drivers, Communications using UUCP, Bourne Shell Programming, and Unix System Installation, Operation, and Administration. I had alot of fun experiences in faraway places trying to create a null-modem using pinouts 2, 3, and 20 (or sometimes even 7,8 and 19) in an RS232C interface to illustrate running a uucico command from one BusinessMate or Astra XL to another.... factor in different revisions of firmware and peripheral devices, as well as interoperability issues between Motorola and Intel computers, and I was always kept on my toes......

I enjoyed teaching and traveling, but I yearned to be back in software development, so my immediate supervision let me code a bulletin board application system for the field engineers. I don't know if anyone actually used it or found it particularly useful when they could just call me up on the phone with questions, but I really enjoyed developing that system application..... before the days of automated bulletin boards (remember those BBS numbers?), before chat rooms and web hosting and instant messenger, I coded a complete system womb-to-tomb and learned alot and had a great time doing it.

I sometimes wondered if a century earlier the founders of NEC could have foreseen that their groundbreaking work in telephony would spawn a worldwide computer and communications conglomorate that not only had the leading market share in Japan for personal computers but also sold over 15,000 products all over the world..... Or that their initial investment in technology would enable a computer scientist like me to play with so many different variants of my favorite operating system on so many different hardware platforms at the same time.....