PC-9800 Series
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 (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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