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PC-9800 Series

NEC PC-9801 RX Personal Computer.jpg
PC-9801RX with the Intel 80286
Type Personal computer
Release date October 1982; 34 years ago (1982-10) (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 (Japanese: PC-9800シリーズ Hepburn: Pī Sī Kyūsen Happyaku Sirīzu?), commonly shortened to PC-98, 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.


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