Hitachi Ltd became the first of Japan’s computer majors to reveal plans for an Internet access terminal. It announced yesterday the possible Japanese launch of a $500 terminal in the fall and says the machine would include either one of Hitachi’s own SH embedded RISC microprocessors or an Intel Corp iAPX-86 processor. It would have a CD-ROM drive and a modem, and use a television set as the screen. The company has not yet decided whether it would introduce the product to overseas markets but says it believes the market for such a product is potentially large although it has no specific projection for its future size. Oracle Corp is trying to persuade a whole string of companies to license its design for such a device, but Hitachi said it had no plans to license anything from Oracle for the machine. NEC Corp told Reuter that it was interested in the idea of developing application-specific personal computers but had not decided whether it would bring such products to market, while spokesmen for Toshiba Corp and Fujitsu Ltd said that at present their firms had no plans to market Internet terminals.
