Its initial technical demonstration was done at Expo '70 in Osaka, and an official announcement was made in 1971, including:[1] The Kanji Keypunch was able to punch up to 2950 kinds of Kanji characters, using the left hand to select one of the 15 shift keys and the right hand to select one of the 240 Kanji characters for each shift.
Until that time, only English alphanumeric and Japanese half-width Katakana characters were processed on IBM mainframes.
The IBM Kanji System thus established the basis for handling up to about 10,000 Japanese characters used in the daily life.
[2] These announcements were followed by other announcements: At the time of its development, Japan's major mainframe companies were developing their own Japanese processing systems independently and at the same time cooperating to establish a Japanese character code industry standard (JIS X 0208).
Some of these systems are: Similar supports later became available for Korean, and Chinese (both in Traditional and Simplified forms).