ASCII Corporation

~ the goodbye ~

For anyone who writes software, ASCII is a character table. It is the thing you check when an encoding goes wrong, and it has been sitting under every text protocol since the sixties without needing anyone's attention. i have used it every working week of my professional life and never once thought of it as a name somebody chose.

Three editors from the Japanese magazine I/O left in 1977 and chose exactly that. ASCII Publishing was founded on 24 May by Kazuhiko Nishi, Akio Gunji and Keiichiro Tsukamoto to put out a computer magazine, and within a year Nishi had talked to Bill Gates and come away with something considerably larger than a magazine.

ASCII Microsoft opened in 1978 as Microsoft's first sales office outside the United States. Nishi became a Microsoft vice president covering the Far East. By 1980 the licensing of Microsoft BASIC through Tokyo was bringing in 1.2 billion yen, which was forty percent of Microsoft's total sales that year. There is a reasonable argument that Microsoft's early survival ran through a Japanese magazine publisher, and it is not an argument you hear made often.

Then in 1983 ASCII and Microsoft together specified MSX, a standard for eight bit home computers meant to end the incompatibility between every Japanese manufacturer's machine. Around five million MSX units sold in Japan and the standard traveled well beyond it. For a few years in the early eighties this company was positioned at the center of the personal computer industry in Asia.

~ the chronicle ~

~ forty percent of microsoft ~

The Microsoft relationship ended in 1986. Microsoft had gone public that year and no longer needed a partner to sell into Japan, so it set up its own subsidiary there and the arrangement lapsed. ASCII kept the magazines and kept the software business, and it listed on the Tokyo Stock Exchange in 1989.

The magazines were genuinely large. Monthly ASCII and LOG IN both ran for years. Then came Famicom Tsūshin, which shortened its name to Famitsu and became the review publication whose scores Japanese publishers actually cared about. On the software side there was RPG Maker, which put game construction in front of people who could not program, and a catalog including Derby Stallion and the Japanese editions of Wizardry.

~ what got sold first ~

In 1991 both co-founders resigned, reportedly over how fast Nishi wanted to expand. The expansion happened anyway and went into semiconductors and satellite communications, neither of which worked. By the end of 1997 the accumulated debt was serious enough that CSK Corporation had to step in with a rescue investment, and ASCII joined the CSK group.

The dismantling then proceeded in order of value. On 1 April 2000 the entire entertainment side was spun out as Enterbrain, taking Famitsu and RPG Maker with it. ASCII delisted from the exchange on 1 October 2002 and passed to Unison Capital, keeping the PC and IT magazines and not much else. Kadokawa bought the parent company in 2004.

~ what came after ~

On 1 April 2008 ASCII was merged with MediaWorks, another Kadokawa property. MediaWorks was the entity that legally survived and ASCII Corporation was the one dissolved, but the combined company took the ASCII name and ASCII's last president, Kiyoshi Takano, ran it. That is a company disappearing while its brand walks out of the room.

ASCII Media Works stopped being a separate company on 1 October 2013, folded with eight others into Kadokawa as an internal brand. The name is still on light novels and manga in Japanese bookshops. The character table is still in every terminal on earth. Neither one points back at three magazine editors who briefly held forty percent of Microsoft's revenue.

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