"Weirder than Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak put together": Japan's answer to Steve Jobs predicted personified computers, smartphones and AI in 1984 through a sixth sense, viewing the world as a dog or a dolphin

In the early 1980s, while Silicon Valley was still arguing over GUIs, disk drives, and whether people would ever want a mouse, 25-year-old Sunao Takatori, a Japanese software designer, was quietly describing a future that looks uncannily like 2026.

In 1984, Alexander Besher, contributing editor at InfoWorld, traveled to Japan to meet Takatori, who was at that time the founder of Ample Software. In his article, published in the May 28 issue that year, Besher described Takatori as “a lot weirder than Bill Gates, Gary Kildall, Mitch Kapor, and Steve Wozniak put together.”

That “weirdness,” viewed four decades later, looks a lot like foresight.