Japanese Computers – Still Living It 8-bit
Recently, there has been a kind of fad in the west where people get all nostalgic about the days of 8-bit computers. The epitome of the 8-bit computing days was the low-res graphics, with characters typically rendered using the bare minimum number of pixels. Of course, technology has advanced since the days of the Commodore 64, and since the advent of sub-pixel rendering (called ClearType in Windows), in particular, the blockiness of text rendered on a computer screen has become barely perceptible for the Latin (i.e. English) alphabet. However, the Latin alphabet is not the only script in the world, and a more interesting question from the perspective of internationalization and globalization is how more complex scripts are rendered in modern times.