PC-98

The PC-9800 series, 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√ó400 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.