I have made contact with the very helpful and civil Support Manager for Brother SA. I got this mail from him after my telephonic query:
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I have checked with my contacts about a Brother software vending machine. They mentioned that the people that worked on the project back in the early ‘80s have all moved on.
They asked, if you give them exactly what information you are looking or what you want to do, they would see what they can help you with.
I have responded as follows:
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I really appreciate your taking the time to ask your Brother contacts about this. Thank you very much.
I am someone who tries to collect and to assist in preserving old software. There is so much software that was written and run, yet is now gone. This is part of our history, part of our various cultures, and very little is done to preserve it as a record for the future. We are just coming through one of the greatest revolutions in human history – the digital revolution if you wish, and there are many around ( like me ) who were in it from the early days of home/cheap computing – Altairs, Apple ][s, Sinclair ZX80s, the IBM PC and so on. It is incredibly important to archive what has passed before and to record it for posterity: yet we junk the old without any thought of the future. Much of this will never be recovered.
Now, in the 80s and 90s Brother did something amazing. They set up software vending machines called Takeru in Japan, and connected these machines via ISDN lines to download any purchase requests not stored on CDs or hard drives in the machines. All this way before public access to the internet. They licensed software from professional software houses and also a lot from your small home developers. Software was available for many different computers – MSX, NEC PC-8800, NEC PC-98, Sharp X1, Sharp X68000, Fujitsu FM-Towns and others, on all kinds of media – 5.25in and 3.5in floppies, cassettes, CDs. These machines were stunning – a touch screen interface, a cash receiver, an inbuilt printer for printing manuals with your software, drives to write your software to. They published Takeru magazines, had a Takeru Club, everything.
The problem is this. Very little of this software is still around, and very little ever comes up for auction in Japan probably because the packaging is not like retail packaging. It is in danger of being lost forever, and that would be just tragic.
What I and some others would like is to ask, or beg, Brother to preserve whatever they still have of this in some way. There must be backups, or old CDs with the software on, somewhere in a library or archive. These need to be saved if at all possible. One possibility is to do this via the Internet Archive, as a trusted third party, and I can assist in establishing contact there. Alternatively there are several people who could assist in getting the software off the media, some based in Japan.
All we ask is that this priceless Takeru collection not be lost.
Now I do realize, being in business, that this is unlikely to be simple, and would involve some time and cost as well as effort. But it is important, important in the records of this digital revolution we are in.
The kind man responded virtually immediately with:
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Brother does have its own museum and I have actually see the Takeru software vending machine in there.
http://www.brother.com/bcs/index.htmI will see what I can do for you.
I do not hold out much hope of this leading anywhere, but I do have SOME hope, so let us see.