Soft Vendor TAKERU

Overview

Soft Vendor TAKERU was a Japanese vending machine that wrote personal computer software onto blank floppy disks at the point of sale. Developed in 1986 by Brother Industries around engineer Yuichi Yasutomo, it is described as the world’s first vending machine for personal computer software, dispensing games and applications not as finished packages but as data copied onto media sold by the machine itself.

At its peak the network of Soft Vendor TAKERU units numbered roughly 300, against an original target of 2,000 installations. Machines were placed at electronics retailers, and the service was operated first by the Brother Industries TAKERU office, which also ran a mail-order operation, before being transferred on May 21, 1994 to the communications systems division of XING, the subsidiary behind the karaoke service JOYSOUND. The whole service ended in February 1997.

The premise was simple and, at the time, strange: a customer selected software on a touch panel, paid, received a blank medium from the machine, and loaded that medium into a drive or writer connected to the unit so the data could be written. A printed manual and a floppy disk case came out alongside it. Where the machine held no cached copy of a title, the data was pulled over a network connection — a VAN line in the first two generations, an ISDN line in the third — so a title could be sold without sitting on a store shelf. Cutting out packaging, manuals, and retail inventory let TAKERU undercut the price of boxed software.

That network outlived the vending machine. The same delivery system was adapted to distribute karaoke track data, and the resulting service, JOYSOUND, used the identical servers: TAKERU by day, JOYSOUND by night, keeping utilization high. An automatic certificate-issuing machine was also spun out of the technology on the same principle. A 30th anniversary event for Soft Vendor TAKERU was held by Brother Industries on November 26, 2016.

History

The idea for Soft Vendor TAKERU began with unsold inventory. When Brother Industries opened the antenna shop Comroad in 1983, the personal computer software on its shelves moved at wildly uneven rates, and some titles simply failed to sell. Around the same time, Brother had contact with NTT through participation in the Captain system, a videotex service predating telecommunications liberalization. Yuichi Yasutomo, then a young employee, hit on the notion of clearing that dead stock through a communications-based “new media” channel. He later recalled, in a 2016 interview with ASCII, that the slow speeds and steep communication costs made such a service look impractical, but that he launched the project with the feeling that it would be hard and worth trying anyway. On August 15, 1983, he consulted the network manager at the telecommunications firm INTEC, and the planning got underway.

Four prototypes were built out of FRP, and the weaknesses showed immediately: poor static electricity and noise characteristics, and communication costs that ran high. Documentation for the PC-98 used to control the machines was scarce, and Yasutomo’s team went to NEC, the manufacturer, to ask for internal materials. The hardware was finished in 1985, and in March of that year a “personal computer software vending system presentation” showed off the four prototypes under the name SV-2000. With the cooperation of 15 consumer electronics retailers including Comroad and J&P, trials ran in Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya through the end of the year.

For the formal launch in April 1986, the service was renamed Soft Vendor TAKERU. The name derives from Yamato Takeru no Mikoto, a hero of the Yamato court’s expansion period. Yasutomo has said that the original plan was to sell it as the SV-2000, but that following the fashion of writing product names in kanji produced “Soft Vendor Takeru” — which children who could not read the characters misread as “Buson.”

The first-generation SV-2000 vending machines gave way to the second-generation SV-2100, which supported 16-bit computers. The third generation arrived in the spring and summer of 1991 under the name NEW TAKERU, model SV-2300: 1,565 by 1,220 by 570 millimeters, with a main CPU moved to an Intel 80386SX, ROM cartridges and the VAN line dropped, and card reader support for the TAKERU CLUB, CD-ROM, 5-inch and 3.5-inch floppy disks, INS network lines, a larger hard disk, a pressure-sensitive touch panel on a CRT monitor, and acceptance of 5,000- and 10,000-yen notes. The first generation was white with blue lines and gray on the top and right side; the second was split red and gray with a yellow logo beneath the monitor; the third was split gray and yellow. Inside, the machines held stocks of blank media in packaging.

The accounting nearly killed it. High communication charges pushed the operation into the red, and in 1987 a budget of 50 million yen was set aside for withdrawal. Yasutomo spent it on continuation instead. Switching from a costly dedicated line to an ordinary analog telephone line, and moving data transmission to cheaper nighttime hours, turned the books marginally profitable and the withdrawal was called off.

The TAKERU CLUB membership organization arrived in 1991: 500 yen to join, 500 yen in annual fees, and a magnetic card recording the member’s purchase history, address, and name. Benefits included not having to re-enter an address when buying software whose manual was shipped separately, member pricing, a monthly members’ paper called TAKERU World compiled from TAKERU Press, and purchase coupons that could be collected toward the price of a desired title — a perk later discontinued. As of March 1992 the club had roughly 40,000 members, overwhelmingly young: 58 percent in their teens and 33 percent in their twenties, 91 percent combined.

Around 1993 the service began carrying doujin software, an idea that came to sales chief Ichiro Hirosawa by chance while walking through Akihabara. It started with flyers handed out at Comiket inviting circles to sell through TAKERU, and grew into one of the service’s pillars. One circle, Image Magic, turned into a mainstream company after its title Möbius Link sold enormously through TAKERU, and the same company developed the digital catalog software Ouchi de TAKERU — built to cut waiting time in stores, sold through TAKERU for the PC-9801 and X68000, and included as a Windows 3.1 edition on CD-ROMs bundled with computer magazines such as Micom BASIC Magazine and TECH Win around 1995.

The karaoke boom of the 1990s pointed toward the machine’s network. Karaoke at the time ran mostly on laserdiscs holding perhaps 30 songs, with new releases taking months to arrive. Yukio Nakatani and colleagues proposed distributing song data over the TAKERU network, and the communications karaoke service JOYSOUND was born from it. The software distribution server for TAKERU and the song data server for JOYSOUND ran on the same system, TAKERU by day and JOYSOUND by night, which kept system utilization high. An automatic certificate-issuing machine also came out of TAKERU’s technology. The service itself ended in February 1997, roughly ten years after launch; Yasutomo said in a 2016 Nikkei TRENDY interview that the business was by then profitable, but that internet infrastructure had not caught up with the processing power of personal computers, and the service was closed on grounds of future prospects.

Business Model

Soft Vendor TAKERU sold software without holding it. The machine kept stocks of blank media inside the cabinet — floppy disks in their packaging, ROM cartridges in the first two generations — and wrote purchased data onto that media at the moment of sale. Where a title was not already cached in the internal hard disk or on the built-in CD-ROM drive, the machine pulled it down over a line: a VAN connection through INTEC’s Ace Telenet or Tri-P in the first two generations, and an ISDN line in the third. This is what allowed the service to sell a catalog far larger than any shelf could hold, and it is also where the economics got interesting.

The revenue side was the sale price. The cost side was the phone bill. Early on the connection was a dedicated line, billed by usage, and transferring software over it took long enough that communication charges exceeded sales — the operation ran at a loss, and by 1987 headquarters had approved 50 million yen for a retreat. The fix was structural: swap the dedicated line for an ordinary analog telephone line, and time the data transfers to the cheap nighttime hours. The service turned marginally profitable on that change alone.

That, in turn, set the pattern the whole enterprise ran on. Because the data moved at night, when nobody was buying anyway, and because the same servers were later carrying karaoke track data for JOYSOUND during the day, the network utilization could be kept high across two businesses that never competed for the same hours. The distribution layer, not the vending machine, was the asset.

On the retail side, TAKERU’s savings were passed to the customer. Omitting the printed package and the bound manual, and eliminating store inventory entirely, let TAKERU price software below what boxed copies cost. The manual and receipt came out of a built-in dot-matrix printer, which was slow — several pages took noticeable time, and the third-generation NEW TAKERU moved to a laser printer at 15 seconds per page. Writing the media itself took around 70 seconds for a 3.5-inch 2DD disk. Any manual over ten pages was shipped separately, and non-members had to mail a printed voucher to the TAKERU office to receive it. Floppy disk cases ran through a progression — paper in green, then blue, then yellow, then plastic in green and black — and in later years became optional before being dropped.

The catalog strategy followed from the same constraint. The lineup was thin, and the service leaned on the long tail: discounted reissues and re-releases of titles already sold in boxes, originals available only through TAKERU, self-developed packaged software shipped by mail, additional scenario collections for well-known works, and tie-ins with magazine projects. Because nothing sat on a shelf, practical software made sense too — New Year’s card material collections and MIDI music data among them. Doujin software, brought in around 1993, became one of the pillars. The member base that supported all this stood at roughly 40,000 as of March 1992, paying 500 yen to join and 500 yen a year.

Cultural Impact

The machine was an answer to a problem that, at the time, most of the industry did not believe existed. When it went live in 1986, 8-bit machines dominated the Japanese market and boxed software was the standard route to a customer’s hands. Buying software over a telephone line was, in that setting, an activity for hobbyists — even computer networking was still the practice of a particular kind of enthusiast. TAKERU went at distribution from the other direction, and the retail press of the time covered the rollout as the arrival of a new channel.

The market answered with indifference, and the reasons were instructive. Software makers had drifted toward the Family Computer, which was where the audience had gone. A boxed Famicom title pulled customers in with a glossy package and a proper manual. A TAKERU floppy disk was a blank with an unprinted label that the buyer had to write the title onto by hand, accompanied by a manual that was mostly text and plainly made. Yukio Nakatani, who joined the effort from Brother’s market research arm Life Research Center, recalled on the television program Kanda Hakuzan’s This Is Our Company’s Dark History that what struck him was customers treating the floppy they had just copied at a TAKERU machine as a counterfeit. Brother tried developing its own software to fill out the catalog, but the company had no background in game development and the attempt went nowhere; doujin titles, enthusiast fare, and adult games followed, and sales did not rise.

What TAKERU did do was open a route for people with no other way in. Takeshi Maruyama of D4 Enterprise, who encountered the service both as a user and as a software developer, has said that for small companies without the resources to produce boxed software, TAKERU was a major presence — a company could sell software from the day it was founded. As MSX declined and software purchases grew difficult, with boxed releases cancelled one after another, MSX enthusiasts bought new titles through TAKERU. Joseph Redon, chairman of the NPO Game Preservation Society, recalled in a 2016 ASCII interview that seeing a TAKERU unit in Akihabara after coming to Japan made an impression on him, and said that had the service continued it would have stood alongside Steam.