Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index

Fifth generation computer systems project

The fifth generation computer systems project (FGCS) was an initiative by Japan, begun in 1982, to create a "fifth generation computer" (see history of computing hardware) which was supposed to perform much calculation utilizing massive parallellism.

To succeed in this ambitious project, the driving organization Institute for New Generation Computer Technology (ICOT) spent billions of Yens in creating specialized hardware and an operating system entirely written in prolog, as this was believed to be a truly parallellizable language.

The fifth generation computer systems project was aimed at becoming a disruptive technology but ended up as a complete failure.