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Dragon Ball (ドラゴンボール) is a Japanese manga by Akira Toriyama serialized in the weekly anthology magazine Shonen Jump from 1984 to 1995 and collected into 42 individual books.
The action-comedy stories incorporated many original jokes and story lines, but it also borrowed from several stories, including a traditional Chinese folk tale Journey to the West (西遊記), several Japanese folk tales including the story of Urashima Taro, and a story involving a ball hunt. The author, being a big fan of Hollywood films, also noticeably includes ideas from movies such as Superman and Terminator. The Dragon Ball story starts off with the young boy Son Goku's encounter with a wealthy, selfish, and genius teenage daughter Bulma who involves Goku into a search for seven Dragon Balls, which could together summon a great dragon who would grant any one wish.
Later stories began to deal more with Goku's various martial arts battles with a variety of opponents. During the course of the series Goku grew from a young boy to an adult, saved the world numerous times, learnt of his origin as an alien, fathered two children, died, returned to life, visited other worlds, died yet again, returned to Earth and returned to life all the while honing his martial arts skills.
Immensely popular, the series spawned three anime series: Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT. (Unlike Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, Akira Toriyama was not directly involved with the creation of Dragon Ball GT.) A number of feature length movies were also created.
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Dragonball is also the name of a microprocessor made by Motorola, that is used mainly in the popular Palm Pilot handheld computers. The dragonball processor is based on the popular 68000 series of processors.