ABSTRACT
In Japan, however, despite the specialization in light-industrial manufacturing and electronics that had developed in the post-war period, there was a very different socio-cultural environment impacting on research and development into computer communications. Hence, 1994 has been described as Japan’s “Internet year one”, and there was a growing awareness in the media that a game of catch up needed to be played. For instance, in October 1994, Japan had only 82,000 host computers, similar to the level the United States had achieved in 1989. In Japan, 50.8 percent of respondents indicated they had never used a computer, in comparison to 21.8 percent of American respondents. In their histories of Japan’s early computer network systems, Japanese researchers have tended to focus on the importance of Jun Murai and his pioneering efforts to establish the Japan unix Network/wide networks.
