Background
Hideo Yamashita was born on May 21, 1899 in Tokyo, Japan.
秀夫 山下
Hideo Yamashita was born on May 21, 1899 in Tokyo, Japan.
Hideo Yamashita graduated from Tokyo Imperial University (now the University of Tokyo) with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering in 1923.
Immediately after the graduation, Hideo Yamashita was appointed as a lecturer of the faculty of electrical engineering of the university. He became an associate professor in 1924.
In February 1938, Hideo Yamashita received a doctor's degree in engineering from the university, and two months later became a professor there. Prior to this, Yamashita spent one and half years in Europe and the US, mostly at MIT. His research interest changed after this to calculating machines, spurred by the need for them at the Bureau of Statistics of the Japanese government. Unfortunately, Yamashita did not give any particular name to the machines. Several machines built following his design were generally called "statistical machines of the Yamashita type."
Hideo Yamashita became involved in the international aspects of computing in 1951, when UNESCO developed a plan to install a large-scale computer to be shared by all the nations of the world. UNESCO held an international meeting to reach a treaty for this purpose in Paris in November 1951. Japan was invited, although she was not quite independent, being still under occupation. The Japanese government appointed Tohru Hagiwara of the Foreign Office as its representative, and named Yamashita as his adviser. The meeting agreed to establish an International Computation Centre in Rome.
After the meeting in Paris in 1951, Yamashita visited the universities and laboratories working on computers in Europe and the US as the very first Japanese ever to have such an opportunity. The information he brought back to Japan and the news of PICC spurred interest in computers at the Academic Congress of Japan, which resulted in its launching the Tokyo Automatic Computer TAC) Project at the University of Tokyo in 1952. TAC, a vacuum tube computer, was finally completed in 1959.
Hideo Yamashita was also active in the managing committee for the first international conference on information processing sponsored by UNESCO and held in Paris in June 1959. The conference was a success. It was UNESCO's policy to only trigger something, and if it was found worth continuing, somebody else had to run it. Auerbach proposed to establish the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP), an international society of societies, to hold international conferences. This proposal was accepted by 12 nations including Japan, which Yamashita represented, and the IFIP came into existence on January 1, 1960. It has been holding a congress every two to three years since 1959. Yamashita had a problem, since Japan did not then have any appropriate national society to participate in the IFIP. In collaboration with Hiroshi Wada, then the head of the Electronics Division of the Electrotechnical Laboratory of the Japanese government (now professor emeritus of Seikei University), Yamashita founded the Information Processing Society of Japan in 1960, and was elected its first president.
Hideo Yamashita published many distinguished papers in the field of electric machinery in his early days. In the field of computing he published a very informative 20-page survey paper in 1954 based on his visits to various universities and laboratories in Europe and the US after the Paris meeting of 1951 for the ICC treaty. He was the editor-in-chief for Handbook of Electronic Computers published by Korona-sha in 1960.
After his retirement from the University of Tokyo in 1960, Hideo Yamashita taught at Toyo University until 1975.
Hideo Yamashita was a professor emeritus of both the University of Tokyo and Toyo University, and an honorary member of the Information Processing Society of Japan, the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan, the Institute of Applied Physics of Japan, and the IEEE. He was also a member of the Japan Academy.