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Information about several papers discussed at the 55th annual meeting of the History of Science Society of Japan on the history of Japanese computing from May 24-25, 2008 is presented. Topics include the development of Kyoto Daigaku Digital Computer I (KDC-I), the role of physicist Eiichi Goto in Japanese computing, and the research strategies of the Electrical Technology Laboratory (ETL). The symposium featured several historians including Chigusa Kita, Shunshi Koyama and Takushi Otani.

The article informs that on April 20, 2005, the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan presented the 21st Japan Prize in the categories of information and media technology and cell biology to Makoto Nagao, a computer programmer. Nagao received the award for his pioneering contributions to natural language processing and intelligent image processing. Nagao led the research of machine translation and for the first time in the world, successfully developed a Japanese-to-English and an English-to-Japanese translation system for abstracts of scientific and technical papers. Nagao has proposed methods appropriate to the analysis of long and complex Japanese sentences, and has achieved extensive results in the field of context analysis. Since 1990, Nagao has made essential proposals regarding the ideal form of digital libraries that incorporate natural language and image processing technologies, including digital library system configurations, user interfaces, and network configurations. Nagao developed and opened Ariadne, one of the earliest digital library prototype systems.