The 34th cultural lecture held on June 7, 1997
at Kyushu University, Fukuoka Japan

Lectured by Tooru Ono

How I encountered with a computer

When I was a student of the university, this hall was used only as a dance hall. Today I have learned how to use the hall like this. I belonged to the soccer club when I was in the general education curriculum. Behind this hall was a very old shabby dormitory in which I was forced to drink until almost losing consciousness at a welcome party for the new comers. Then I was again urged to play social dances with ladies as part of a sort of "grown-up" ceremony. At that time there was a jazz band called Modern Scholars which one of my old high school friends belonged to. He lured me into joining the band. He became a professional musician after he graduated from the university. His name is Fumio Karashima, and he is actively playing in the US now. Whenever I came up to this stage, I played jazz for dancing. So it makes me feel somewhat strange to be here today.

Whenever I talk with old members of Kyushu University, I often refer to an accident that happened during my 3rd year here. It was the crash of a U.S. fighter plane on the campus. I had already moved to Hakozaki district and lived just in front of the university. About half past seven or eight in the evening, I heard the big sound of the crash. I dashed to the window to see what happened. What I saw was a running fire over the site. I first thought it was an accident caused by a mistake in an experiment in a laboratory. I dashed to the site as other people did. People there were in great confusion asking each other what happened. Some were crying "An airplane has crashed!", "What! Where did it hit?", "Just here, on this building.", "What is the building for?", "It is the computer center of the university." At that time I hadn't seen any main frame computers except in the SF world. Computers were still far away from us then, and we were not allowed to touch them with even a single finger. As you may know, computers were very expensive in those days. Even Kyushu University needed to build a complete computer center in order to introduce them. The building was a new surprise for me. As a proverb says "If you are too forward, you are likely to meet disaster." A jet fighter has selected its crash site into the computer center, indeed.

Since then I have long been shadowed tenaciously by computers, until today as you may know. During my final year at the university, I chose the computer as my graduation thesis. Computers never made me feel free since then. I got a job in the electric department of Hitachi Corporation. Since then I have been involved all the time in computer-related work. The crash accident of the jet plane changed my course. I am still under the influence of computers.