Nor was the resolution of IBM PC's display high enough to show the complex characters of these languages.

The first model of 5550 was designed to read a display font from an external storage for multilingual support, including Chinese and Korean languages.

[3] The 5550 fulfills three roles, via the following components: The original Bunsho Program and emulators booted from a floppy disk without Nihongo DOS.

Yu Kawara (川原 裕) of IBM Fujisawa Development Laboratory planned the terminal with a combination of word processor and personal computer, called the Multi-functional Workstation, and he proposed it at the headquarter in March 1981.

[7] The team set goals for IBM 5550 that the machine was usable for both word processing and personal computing on the same architecture at least 3-5 years.

They tried to build the 5550 from the IBM Displaywriter System 6580, the English word processor developed in Austin office in 1980, and the IBM Personal Computer developed in Boca Raton office, but it was difficult to combine different types of machines.

[7] The team didn't consider the machine was used for online communication, but they realized its importance during the development.

Describing the 5550 as "a true workstation", the magazine envisioned the computer as filling the "considerable gulf above the PC", and a rival to the IBM System/36 minicomputer.

It praised the 5550's "unprecedented" combination of kanji support with high-end word-processing capability, and reported that in Japan an ecosystem of vendors providing products for the computer was forming.

A manager of its System Development section said, "IBM supports us to satisfy our demand for the communication software.