It seems to me that there could be toom in these fun-packed game-crazy days for a modern version of an ancient game.

Let's call it Japanese Chequers - it's an updated form of the Chinese Chequers that you might remember or still play. The object, for those who do neither, is to manoeuvre your pieces from one corner of a six-pointed star to the opposite corner. In the tangled centrefield area you proceed by jumping over your own or other players' pieces. The winner is the first to get all his pieces home.

In Japanese Chequers the layout of the board is the same but the object is subtly different. Instead of moving across the board with all his/her pieces, each player simple moves into the central area and stays put, or at most moves in apparently purposeless feints to either side, with the result that the area of no-man's land behinds to look like a writhing snake-pit.

The players may as well be named: they are Sharp, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Matsushita, Sanyo and Hitachi. For the sake of variety an occasional game might include Sord or Sony or one of the others - the players needn't always be the same. The board represents the personal computer business.

But it doesn't often happen that a player drops out altogether - as a number have done in the US and UK tournaments - so you have to think of Japanese Chequers as a soft of circulating event.

Why do none of them drop out? The short answer is that they can stand a loss - home computers (or computers of any kind) are rarely the be all and end all of their existences. Sharp for example, has recently launched three new models in the PC line, but the press handout that trumpted their merits also covered a new microwave oven, an office copier and a couple of solar-powered calculators.

Or take Toshiba. This company has a respectable range of 8-bit micros, some more powerful office systems and some Japanese word processors. Even so it is hardly a dominant force in the personal computer market.

But if you want a power plant it's the one to call on; or how about rolling stock for your electric train (not the one in the basement, the one that links London and Glasgow). For entertainment you could order your own TV station with all the trimmings - cameras, monitors, lighting, broadcasting equipment, even a satellite. If you fall ill Toshiba can supply the most sophisticated medical appliances, and to speed the get-well cards on their way it provides the post offices with automatic sorting equipment.

But I'm labouring the point. I could go on, or take another manufacturer or five; but let's get down to the PC and look what goes into it - memory chips, processor chips, peripherals and the rest. Most of the micro makers make their own - Sharp, for example, is using bubble memory chips where the likes of National Semiconductor gave up with the technology years ago.

This self-sufficiency adds another string to their bow, gives them greater control over quality, and reduces prices by cutting out the middle man.

If sales are slow to take off they usually have plenty of fat to live off from their other endeavours (Fujitsu is an exception, being almost exclusively a computer manufacturer, but even so it spans the entire range from micro to mainframe). They can afford to operate for longer on less, because the chances are that business will be strong in some other area in which they are active.

As operating systems bring us closer to a tolerable level of compatibility the main difference between suppliers will be value for money - that will go with the economies of scale, reliability, and the range of models offered. The melee on the Japanese Chequers board will go on and the names will probably not change, but it's far from futile activity, especially if you're a customer - they all tend to be there from one day to the next.