Retro, you missed the bus. https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:SegaCompanyProfile_JP_1988.pdf&page=12 I didn't spend a lot of time looking at Sega's 1988 company profile. Turns out, its Sega AI Computer page is more than "this thing exists" - it claims the company set up a subsidiary, "Sega Education System" (セガエデュケーションシステム) to deal with the Japanese educational market. This is one such endeavour, a bus, full of AI Computers, in partnership with Kagaku Gijutsu-kan (科学技術館), aka Tokyo's Science Museum. There's also talk on the profile page of working with Linguaphone. Sega would purchase the Japanese arm of Linguaphone at some point, which is why we have such curiosities as The Linguaphone Education Gear, aka the Japanese release of the Multi-Mega (CDX). I think Sega had a secret education business beyond these one-shot devices like the AI Computer and Pico. I think they were in schools, teaching Japanese children.
I don't currently have a subscription to this Newspaper site, but they set up Linguaphone Japan Ltd. in 1987, so yeah, fits in with the AI Computer timeline.
I always wondered whether the E-series Educational carts for the SC-3000 were used in schools. The titles of the software seem to indicate that they were tailored for the specifics of the Japanese school curriculum at the time. I don't know if they were sold to home consumers for extra tutelage at home, or if they were sold and marketed directly to schools.
Well it got me thinking - there's a blank spot in our knowledge about computers in Japanese schools. If Sega were prepared to set up a subsidiary specifically for this market, that might suggest they were big players. Or wanted to be big players. Or there were no big players. My assumption was that, pre-Windows 95, NEC would have swept in, because the PC-9800 series was big in business and they were market leaders and whatever. But I've been through lists of games for NEC Retro - there aren't many educational ones, and whlie I haven't been explicitly looking for educational software in Japanese computing magazines, I haven't consciously run into any. I was doing some research on the AI Computer, working on the basis that it was obscure and nobody bought one, but you genuinely start to wonder... could there be more? To illustrate the point: Here's an Amstrad PCW, released around the same time. At a fraction of the price of an IBM PC, it was one of the best selling computers in the UK at 1.5 million units. I live here and care about computers. I have never seen one. It's like they completely disappeared.
https://segaretro.org/index.php?title=File:GameMachine_JP_312.pdf&page=16 Put in context with Nakayama pushing both consoles and toys around the same time it all starts to make a kind of sense. I guess the Pico lasting right into the 2000s and Sega Toys still surviving to this day is its legacy?
Although the current scans are low quality, that art style looks very familiar. Could this be Miho Takeda's work?
