ucbked@athena.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) (09/16/90)
When I was in Japan in June, I noticed an advertisement for a Japanese languge FEP for SCO Xenix. I contacted the company, a hole in the wall operation that apparently is SCOs rep in Japan (not the point of this posting, but any company that entrusts the world's second largest computer market to such firms is looking for trouble). As is often the case, this company could write advertising copy faster than they could write code. Apparently what they were doing is taking a FEP written for SUNs and trying to port it to SCO Xenix. I could get no more information out of them. I suspect what they were doing is trying to port wnn developed at Kyo^to University. I have the source code for wnn (from the UofT server), but before I reinvent the wheel and (try to) port it myself, I thought I would ask for comments, information, etc. Any and all information on multi-lingual support for Xenix would be appreciated. Doubtless there will be some (many?) who will respond to this posting the way the US auto industry responded to the first Japanese autos in the 1960s. On the other hand, I hope that there might be one or two souls out there who recognize that not all the world wishes to relate to its computers in American accented ascii.
goer@quads.uchicago.edu (Richard L. Goerwitz) (09/16/90)
Ucbked@athena.berkeley.edu (Earl H. Kinmonth) writes: >Doubtless there will be some (many?) who will respond to this posting >the way the US auto industry responded to the first Japanese autos in >the 1960s. On the other hand, I hope that there might be one or two >souls out there who recognize that not all the world wishes to relate >to its computers in American accented ascii. This is a word to the wise which will surely go unheeded. The prob- lem is simple. Most Americans haven't the faintest idea what another language really is, still less how to prepare for an international market in which using them - often several in the same environment - is all about. I am constantly astonished at how our terminals can't even shift in and out of left-right/right-left/up-down wordwrap me- thods, and, moreover, at how the designers don't even understand why a terminal so constructed might not fare well in a long-term inter- national market. I recall going through this same problem in the X newsgroup, and being met with a lot of snide put-downs. -Richard