Hiro Yamada – dentist
BC. There's not much about you on Canopus's site either. Can you tell me something about yourself?HY. I'm actually a qualified dentist. I graduated as a dentist when I was 24 years old, having studied six years to get my license.
As I said, though, electronics had been my hobby. However, my parents and family had seen what I was doing and had reckoned that dentistry was a good way to make money for someone who was good with their hands with small things.
But I did return to electronics. I went back to university to do a first-level degree in the subject. I did that during the day and worked as a dentist at night. I'd got a family of my own by then and had promised that after getting my electronics degree I would work full-time as a dentist.
So, at the age of 28, that's what I did. But, after a year doing it full-time, I'd had enough. I especially hated been forced to sell all the extras and special services, many of them unnecessary. I didn't want to do this - selling gold crowns to people with money - and not doing as good a job as I could have done for the less well off. But that was what was expected of me.
As a result I changed again, working two days at electronics in Osaka, two days electronics in Kobe and two days as a dentist. I'd been doing this for a year and a half when I bought an NEC 98-series PC and realised that I wanted to have a CP/M emulator for it. I bought the NEC in September 1982 and started the company in April 1983.
The software for the CP/M emulator was done by a friend of mine, Hiroyasu Kinoue, and he's still with the company now, as a senior software engineer. In fact, most of the people who started with the company are still with it.