I have lived in Japan since 1983, and I started working as a freelance Japanese-to-English translator in 1986. I wanted to produce clean-looking text in English for my clients, so after a few months using a manual typewriter I took out a loan and bought a Macintosh with a dot-matrix printer. If I remember correctly, it cost six hundred thousand yen. The Mac could not handle Japanese; when I needed to write Japanese text, such as for notes to clients, I wrote by hand. I eventually bought a dedicated Japanese word processor for writing clean text in Japanese.
Around 1992, I bought a modem and went online, first to a local foreign-run BBS and then, a couple of years later, the Internet. Many of the first friends I made online were Japanese-English translators like myself, and some of the most active discussion groups I took part in were about the Japanese language and translation.
The display of Japanese characters in our online discussions was a problem for a long time. Even as more and more of the participants became able to type Japanese on their own computers, they were using a variety of OSs and character encodings, and the Japanese parts of their messages, when posted online, would be corrupted more often than not. When discussing a particular Japanese expression, we would have to romanize the Japanese and, sometimes, explain what kanji were used.
Here’s are two examples from posts to a translators’ mailing list in 1998:
> While this handbook uses "åòå≈ê´" for "robustness", the systems engineers I work with prefer "ÉçÉoÉXÉgê´" <robasutosei>.
> Ruth, the kanji for taikou are tai (as in taishi - Crown Prince) and kou (as in kugurido - the radical is mon with gou inside (gou = au/awasersu). Does this help? The dictionary meaning obviously does not make sense here.
This made it impractical to discuss longer texts or to have our discussions in both English and Japanese.
It was a great relief when, around 2000 or so, the encoding issues were gradually resolved and we became able to write Japanese freely in our online discussions.
(Addendum: I am still in touch with some of the people on that mailing list, including the Ruth mentioned above. In fact, last month I attended a party in Yokohama in honor of her and her husband’s 55th wedding anniversary. Several other friends I first met online in the mid-1990s were there, too.)