Japan's Fifth Generation Computer Systems: Success or Failure?
This post is a summary of content from papers covering the topic, it's mostly quotes from the papers from 1983, 1993 and 1997 with some edition, references to the present and future depend on the paper but should be easy to deduce. See the Sources section at the end.
In 1981, the emergence of the government-industry project in Japan known as Fifth Generation Computer Systems (FGCS) was unexpected and dramatic.
The Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and some of its scientists at Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) planned a project of remarkable scope, projecting both technical daring and major impact upon the economy and society.
This project captured the imagination of the Japanese people (e.g. a book in Japanese by Junichiro Uemae recounting its birth was titled The Japanese Dream).
It also captured the attention of the governments and computer industries of the USA and Europe, who were already wary of Japanese takeovers of important industries.
