If you've ever followed the gaming world, you're probably familiar with Sega. As the company behind consoles like the Sega Genesis and beloved characters like Sonic the Hedgehog, Sega boasts a long and largely successful history. However, one of the company's lesser-known ventures was the Sega AI computer, which launched in Japan in 1986. It featured a 16-bit NEC V20 CPU clocked at 5MHz, 128KB of RAM, and used a combination of cassettes and Sega My Cards for software storage. Recently, one of these rare units was discovered and preserved, offering us a glimpse into what might be considered the first ever "AI computer."

This all comes thanks to Omar Cornut, who found and purchased one of these units and shared his findings with SMS Power. He also dumped a number of software cards and tapes, and the team at SMS Power have been able to show off some of the games and other software that were able to run on this machine.

Regarding the nature of the software, most of it was designed for children, with the objective of teaching Prolog AI. Although Prolog is not as widely used as it once was, it still finds application in certain industrial contexts, such as IBM's Watson—a computer system adept at parsing natural language.

An example of the software included with this computer was a diary application designed for children. "Electronics" magazine, in its July 1986 issue, described the application as prompting the user with questions about their day. The user would respond with one or two-word answers, from which a grammatically correct diary entry would be generated.

“The majority of these software titles had zero information about them on the internet prior to us publishing them: no screenshots, no photos or scans of the actual software,” Cornut told Dexerto, “Considering the elusive nature of this machine, it is possible that some games have never been seen or completed by anyone outside of their original development teams. We hope that this release will be interesting to obscure game and computer historians and hobbyists alike. We will further amend it over time by releasing extra scans, hopefully improving emulation and publishing/discovering new information.”

Sega's AI computer never came to the United States (or even left Japan), but it's interesting that a computer from nearly forty years ago was being marketed in a way that wouldn't be out of place today, particularly with the likes of Intel talking about "AI PC" nowadays. Of course, the Sega AI computer was ridiculously underpowered compared to even the most budget of PCs released today, but "AI" back then was something very different to what we know it today. It certainly was nothing like ChatGPT, that's for sure.