President Profile

Yutaka Emura

Yutaka Emura is an American software programmer, best known as the developer of the EmTerm communication program and the EmEditor text editor program. He is the president of Emurasoft, Inc. located in Redmond, Washington, U.S.A., and the president of EmSoft, K.K. located in Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan.

Yutaka Emura was born and raised in Takarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. His first experience with computers was in 1981 with the NEC PC-6001 personal computer. At this time, he wrote a game for the NEC PC-6001 called Rally 16, which was introduced in the I/O magazine and sold by cassette tapes. During his high school years, he studied one year at Hope High School in Providence, Rhode Island from September 1983 to June 1984. He also took math classes at Brown University – through an open school program for high school students.

He attended University of Tsukuba in Ibaraki Prefecture, and majored in Materials Science. Then he proceeded to the graduate school of University of Tsukuba and acquired a Masters of Engineering. During his academic years, he wrote a number of papers about the crystal structure of Martensite.¹ He won the Best Paper Award from The Japan Institute of Metals (JIM) with his co-authors, Dr. Takuya Ohba and Dr. Kazuhiro Otsuka.² In 1991, he spoke about his research at the Materials Research Society Meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

He joined Intel Japan, K.K. in April 1991, and worked as a Product Engineer of Intel microprocessors. He worked mostly in Tsukuba, Japan, but also worked in Folsom, California, U.S.A., for 10 months out of the year. When not working for Intel, he wrote three games for Windows– Block Breaker, Emlith and EmPipe. They were sold as shareware, and also included in a retail package called “Windows FunPack!” by Wayforward Technologies.

In June 1994, he left Intel Japan, to start his own software company. He wrote a communication program called EmTerm. In August 1995, he founded EmSoft (later called EmSoft, K.K.). Many modems were bundled and sold with EmTerm just as the Internet and BBS became widely popular. This business model helped EmTerm become one of the standard communication and telnet programs in Japan at the time.

After the success of EmTerm, he wrote EmNifty, which was a program to quickly connect and read emails and messages automatically for NIFTY-Serve (later called @nifty). In October 1998, he started a forum called EmSoft Forum, in NIFTY-Serve, and became a SysOp for the forum until the NIFTY-Serve service ended in February 2005. While working as a SysOp for the forum, he wrote extensive amounts of journaling there.

In 1997, he started writing the EmEditor text editor program. Its initial version was taken from a text editor engine used in EmTerm and EmNifty. The first version of EmEditor was released as free software, but it became shareware after Version 2.

In 2000, he founded Emurasoft, Inc. in Redmond, Washington, and he himself moved to the area in 2001.³ While he continued developing EmEditor and his FTP program, EmFTP, he also translated and localized software including ShadowFlare and Ultrabac between Japanese and English. As of 2009, Version 8 is the latest version of EmEditor and its considerable popularly is primarily due to its lightweight design and Unicode support. In 2008, EmEditor was awarded the Shareware Industry Award in the Best Applications category at the Software Industry Conference.

Yutaka Emura is a lifetime member of both the Association of Shareware Professionals and the Educational Software Cooperative.

Lectures

Materials Research Society Meeting– Crystal Structure of Martensite in Au-49.5at%Cd Alloy (December 1991)
Japanese Association of Computer Science– Shareware Programs (April 1999)
Shareware Industry Conference 2006– Marketing in Japan (July 2006)

Writing

I/O, Kogakusha, 1983
EmTerm 95 License Pack, Shoeisha
エムターム (EmTerm), ASCII, Vol. 18, #9, Sept 1995
イチローを応援しながら ASCII, Vol. 25, #6, June 2001
Windows NT World, IDG
Windows 2000 World, IDG
Inside Windows, Softbank Publishing
C++ Magazine, Softbank Publishing
The Windows, Softbank Publishing
WinSock 2 (translation and editorial supervisor), Softbank Publishing

References

¹ Materials Research Society Website
² Materials Transactions Online Vol.33 No.01 pp.29-37
³ Jungle City.com Bravo! Interview (Japanese), SharewareRadio Podcast, Interview