Profits may not be sparkling at TOPS, but the company reports a big surge in interest in its products in Japan, saying that now that the Kanji version of TOPS DOS runs on the five most popular Japanese MS-DOS machines, sales of its products in Japan have increased more than 500%, making it a leading player in the Asi an local area networking market. The lack of standardisation in the MS-DOS market in Japan – each manufacturer’s implementation is proprietary as in the very early days of MS-DOS inthe US and Europe – making it impossible to create mixed vendor local net works of personal computers. TOPS solved the compatibility problem by providing file sharing between the five most widely used brands of MS-DOS machine, well as with Macintosh and Unix systems. And the company reports that sales of TOPS products in Europe more than doubled in 1989 following wider acceptance this side of the water of the Apple Computer Inc Macintosh in busin ess, creating demand for Macintosh-to-MS-DOS intercommunication.
