June 18, 1989

MY SURLY item on Sun Microsystems Inc. licensing its SPARC chip to Toshiba Corp. (June 4) really smoked ‘em out. One reporter friend was incensed. He asked me if Intel Corp. President Andy Grove and National Semiconductor Corp. President Charlie Sporck, who loudly sing the trade-deficit blues, took me to lunch.

This is a complex issue, and I don’t pretend to know all its facets. But when we have factories closing down right and left in the United States, it can only be ridiculous to keep handing products to the Japanese (or other countries) to manufacture.

This has nothing to do with patriotism or lack thereof. U.S. investors want to double their money overnight, a kind of carpetbagger mentality that is totally inappropriate for true economic growth. If there’s one significant, glaring difference between the United States and Japan that can be pretty easily remedied, this is it.

A couple stories underscore my point.

One, which I’ve mentioned before, is the breathtakingly absurd story of Atherton inventor Tony Hodges and his TONY! Ergonomic KeySystem.

Hodges, a touch typist, invented a computer keyboard more than a year ago that virtually eliminates chronic overuse syndromes like carpal tunnel. Fully adjustable, it splits down the middle and tilts so the hands can work in a normal position (perpendicular to the floor, thumbs up).

Hodges had the keyboard tested for 14 weeks by Robert Markison, chief of hand surgery at San Francisco General Hospital and assistant professor of surgery at the UC School of Medicine. Markison tested the keyboard’s physiological benefits and had at least 10 “facile typists” at SF General use it.

Here’s the short form of his evaluation: “Used properly, the Tony KeySystem should help typists PREVENT muscular strain and pain, as well as PREVENT the repetitive strain injuries and possible disability that can follow from them. (By contrast, the conventional flat slab keyboard requires physiological contortions that almost guarantee muscular strain and pain, eventual injury and possible disability.)”

So why don’t I have a TONY!? Because Hodges can’t find a company to manufacture it in the United States.

The TONY! was hewn from a Macintosh keyboard, so Apple Computer Inc. was an obvious target. “They said that they would put up $3 million to bring it to market on the condition that half the money was put up by a Japanese firm ˆ the firm that does their keyboards ˆ who had to manufacture it,” Hodges said.

Hodges said he knew some U.S. companies who wanted to bid on the manufacturing. “They said they wouldn’t open the bidding,” he says. “I told them, “Now I know who took a bite out of the Apple logo. (The Japanese) didn’t eat your sushi, they got your Apple.”‘

The Apple official in charge of peripherals wasn’t available for comment by press time, but in any case, Hodges says Apple is not unusual. “I simply had more time with them,” Hodges said. “It’s just the whole attitude of America.” He’s been wooed by Japanese firms who offer to finance the whole project, but he refuses to go offshore.

Then there is David Yurth, president of MicroVideo Systems in Salt Lake City. Yurth’s product allows a modified IBM PC-AT to produce photo-real, broadcast quality imaging and animation (usually requiring mainframe power) for less than $100,000.

He says the system “instantly bridge(s) the considerable gap” separating the Japanese from U.S. video and film production capability. The Japanese want it, he says, because it makes the “big iron” obsolete and opens high-end animation to a new market.

Though he has pitched the product all over the U.S., so far only SNK-Tokyo has approached with serious intent, he says. “We have resisted … because we (have) a deep-seated resistance to selling outside U.S. borders, especially to the Japanese,” Yurth says. “It’s just insane that we can’t find anybody in the domestic investment community who’s willing to step up to the mark and work with us … Every domestic source we have approached has been more interested in pirating the technology for resale to the Japanese than in supporting a 3-to-5-year plan.”

The result of a short-term focus, Yurth says, is that good projects get beached and no real capital is created, leaving a “frightful residue of bastardized technology which the Japanese and others have salvaged and turned into a profit. The development of VTR technology by Sony and Panasonic is a key case in point.”

Yurth is determined that MicroVideo will make it. If no sane domestic investors step in with the long term in mind, not “short-term rip-off tactics,” Yurth says his “next missive to you will be on a postcard from Tokyo.”