NEC PC-9801
PC-9801RX with the Intel 80286
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| Type | Personal computer |
|---|---|
| Release date | October 1982 (PC-9801) |
| Introductory price | ¥298,000 |
| Discontinued | 2003 |
| Operating system | CP/M-86, MS-DOS, OS/2, Windows |
| CPU | 8086 @ 5 MHz and higher |
| Memory | 128 kilobytes and higher |
| Predecessor | PC-8800 Series |
The PC-9800 Series is a lineup of Japanese 16-bit and 32-bit personal computers manufactured by NEC from 1982 through 2000. The platform established NEC's dominance in the Japanese personal computer market, and by 1999, more than 18 million PC-98 units had been sold.
The first model, the PC-9801, was launched on October 1982, and employed an 8086 CPU. It ran at a clock speed of 5 MHz, with two µPD7220 display controllers (one for text, the other for video graphics), and shipped with 128 KB of RAM, expandable to 640 KB. Its 8-color display had a maximum resolution of 640×400 pixels. Its successor, the PC-9801E, which appeared in 1983, employed an 8086-2 CPU, which could selectively run at a speed of either 5 or 8 MHz. The NEC PC-9801VM used NEC V30 CPU.
When the PC-9801 was launched in 1982, it was initially priced at 298,000 yen (about US$1,200 in 1982 dollars).
In the 1980s and early 1990s, NEC dominated the Japan domestic PC market with more than 60% of the PCs sold as PC-9801 or PC-8801. In 1990, IBM Japan introduced the DOS/V operating system which enabled displaying Japanese text on standard IBM PC/AT VGA adapters. After that, the decline of the PC-98 began. The PC-9801's last successor was the Celeron-based PC-9821Ra43 (with a clock frequency of 433 MHz, using a 440FX chipset-based motherboard design from 1998), which appeared in 2000.
While NEC did not market these specific machines in the West, it did sell the NEC APC III, which has similar hardware as early PC-98 models.
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