30) IBM’s Future System and NTT’s Response

  
Yasusada Kitahara, Leading Director and Chief Engineer of NTT


It was around the fall of 1973 when the information was spread that IBM was working on the concept of “Future System” (FS) as a successor to the generation 3.5 “370 series” which implemented LSIs. It became a heated topic that it would be Super LSI or Giant LSI which would surpass the LSI in the previous generation.

At the time NTT made the first move, and in the spring of 1974, they started to work on countermeasures with three companies - Fujitsu, NEC and Hitachi - , and in September, compiled concrete policies. In October of 1974, President Shigeru Yonezawa visited the AT&T affiliated Bell Telephone Laboratories in the United States. Immediately after returning to Japan, the go-ahead was given to create a research and development system. In February 1975, NTT signed a cooperative development agreement with these three companies.

Yasusada Kitahara, Leading Director and Chief Engineer of NTT, took the lead of the project over all. Although he was known as a charismatic person who was regarded as a future presidential candidate, the impression that I got on meeting him in person was typical of an engineer as in the photograph, and spoke passionately, saying, "we are in the middle of an ideological computer reformation."

Regarding the plans to invest 20 billion yen over three years starting from the 1975 fiscal year, the answer was "the project is certainly large in scale for NTT, but it is an indispensable investment regarding future image data communication".

The term VLSI was supposedly used for the first time by Hiroo Toyoda (later to be Director of Musashino Electrical Communication Laboratory) who created this development plan.


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