How it all began
BC. I wasn't able to find a lot of background information on Canopus's web site about how the company began. What everyone says is that the company started out in graphics cards. Care to tell me more?HY. No, Canopus didn't start out with graphics cards, that came later. It started with an add-in Z80 CPU card to run in NEC's PC 98-series computers - these machines totally dominated the Japanese PC market for a long time. Then we followed up with a version using an Hitachi CPU, a Z80-compatible.
These add-in CPU cards sold well - about one per cent of all NEC PC98 machine had them.
This started as a hobby – I had one of these NEC machines and there were CP/M programs I wanted to run and the card was created to let me do that. Then I realised that people wanted to buy the card for just the same reason. So, I needed to start a company to sell them, and that's how it all began - in 1983. The company started up when a product suitable for sale was ready.
The next year we started making an analogue/digital (A/D) board, and that was followed by a D/A board, and then by a DSP (digital signal processing) board. We also created lots of applications to support the boards we made.
We created vibration-diagnosis hardware and our product was the biggest user at the time of the first version of Zoran's DSP. The product was used for quality-control of melons - checking how ripe they were, whether they had holes inside - melons are only good to eat for a short while.
When Windows 2.0 was announced in Japan, Canopus developed an expansion card to add better graphics functionality to the NEC PC98. The price was high - much higher than for standard VGA cards – but the cost of the NEC was high, so people were willing to pay.
But, then standard IBM-PC compatibles started to come into Japan in - and so we knew that if we wanted to continue selling graphics cards, we had to start making VGA cards. We realised, too, that there was a world market for such cards and that was when and why we opened our office in the USA.
One of the other interesting products we created - in addition to the melon-measurer - was a system for dentists that measured jaw movement, and this is still on sale. It's good for patients - they only have to hold a magnet between their teeth - and measures movement, so it's especially useful for examining crowns and the good-fit of dentures.
