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MO5.COM is pleased to announce that creator of the MSX computer, Kazuhiko Nishi recently joined the association as Honorary Member.
He regards the work of our association as highly welcome and necessary, and he therefore decided to support us and become Honorary Member. Such an important figure of the video game industry will undoubtedly help us grow and gain further popularity.
Born on February 10th 1956 in Kobe, Kazuhiko Nishi attended Waseda University but dropped out to help found the very first Japanese computer magazine, I/O. Then he launched ASCII magazine and, in 1978, the company ASCII Corporation, which began by translating Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord (1981) to Japanese. Nishi worked with NEC on developing the PC-8001 which became a standard in Japan, and was involved in the design of the Kyotronic 85 which, sold to Radio Shack, became the TRS-80 Model 100, an early laptop computer. That’s why Nishi wanted ASCII Corporation to develop personal computers but the company didn’t have enough capital to do it. However, since he met and got along with Microsoft founder Bill Gates in 1978, and since he knew Microsoft BASIC was becoming the industry standard in North America, he thought about selling it to Japanese companies. Moreover, MSX, a new personal computer format, designed as an attempt to create unified standards among various home computing system manufacturers of the period (Sony, Panasonic, Philips, etc.), was jointly developed by Microsoft and ASCII Corporation. It was launched in 1983, followed by MSX2 in 1985 and MSX2+ in 1988. The partnership between Nishi and Bill Gates was dissolved in 1986, but ASCII Corporation continued to thrive, investing heavily in American startups in the electronics industry. Unfortunately, by 1992 ASCII Corporation was heavily in debt and its stock price collapsed. ASCII Corporation became a subsidiary of Kadokawa Group Holdings in 2004, and merged with another Kadokawa subsidiary MediaWorks on April 1, 2008, and became ASCII Media Works. After 1986, Kazuhiko Nishi wrote for newspapers and authored a number of books. He sat in several committees on behalf of the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications and of the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, and he is a member of the Committee for World Economy in the 21st Century. Nishi is the president of MSX Association and Digital do MaiN, an audio engineering company. He has also been the principal of a combined junior and senior high school, Suma Gakuen, in Kobe, since 2002.
