Yoshiro Nakamatsu
Among Nakamatsu's early inventions is the Shoyu Churu Churu, a siphon pump used in the home to move soy sauce from large containers to smaller vessels for cooking and serving. His patented inventions include:
Based upon a patent issued in 1952, Nakamatsu claims to have invented the first floppy disk well before IBM's floppy disk patent was filed in 1969. However, what Nakamatsu patented in 1952 was a paper for optical sound player. In contrast to a floppy disk, this Nakamatsu patent discloses the use of printed paper for storage instead of the magnetic material of a floppy disk. It is not rewritable and lacks most elements of the IBM floppy disk patent. Since the paper was 'floppy' material, he claims he had invented the floppy disk (sometimes he uses the phrase "floppy media"); however, it should be noted that flexible magnetic recording media was well known prior to 1952, in tape and wire recording.
History of science and technology in Japan
Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA), also called Red Book, was an audio format developed by Sony and Philips in 1980, and commercially introduced with their compact disc (CD) format in 1982.In 1968, the first text-to-speech synthesis system was developed by Noriko Umeda's team at Japan's Electrotechnical Laboratory.The direct-drive turntable was invented by Shuichi Obata, an engineer at Matsushita (now Panasonic), based in Osaka, Japan. It eliminated the belts of older belt-drive turntables, and instead employed a motor to directly drive a platter on which a vinyl record rests. In 1969, Matsushita released it as the SP-10, the first direct-drive turntable on the market, and the first in their Technics series of turntables. This gave rise to turntablism, with the most influential turntable being the Technics SL-1200, released in 1972 and remaining the most widely used turntable in DJ culture for the next several decades.