NEC PC-9800 Series (1982 - 2003)

1982 - 2003

dead japan

nec shipped the pc-9801 in october 1982 and then spent a decade owning japanese computing, past sixty percent of the market by 1991. the reason was writing. an ibm clone in the eighties could not put japanese text on a screen at a size you could read, and the pc-98 had the character rom and the display hardware to do it. ibm japan solved the same problem in software with dos/v in 1990, and windows 95 finished the argument, since software written for windows no longer cared what machine was underneath. nec stopped taking orders on 30 september 2003 with 18.3 million units shipped.

~ the obituary ~

The PC-98 was Japan-only at the character layer, which is a lock you cannot buy your way past. Turkish needs six letters English does not have. by the late nineties those fit inside a single-byte codepage and a font file. in fairness, japanese needs several thousand characters at a size where you can still tell them apart. In 1982 that meant a ROM chip full of glyphs and a display controller built to place them (roughly). but still, nEC had both while IBM did not. anyway. So Japan got its own personal computer standard, and then kept it for twenty years.

this is mostly told from the outside. NEC shipped the PC-9801 in october '82 for 298,000 yen, an 8086 running at 5 MHz with the kanji hardware wired in. It was compatible with nothing outside Japan and it did not need to be, because the software that mattered to a Japanese office was written for it. Word processing software and the entire domestic games industry both targeted the PC-98. really though, every title made the next buyer's decision easier.

i was not paying attention by then, but anyway. in those days. By '91 NEC held over sixty percent of the Japanese PC market and rather more than that in some segments. Sharp's X68000 and Fujitsu's FM Towns were better machines in ways. neither of them mattered at the scale NEC was operating on. Total shipments across the whole series reached 18.3 million.

~ the case file ~

Born	october 1982, the PC-9801 at 298,000 yen
Peak	over 60 percent of the Japanese PC market by 1991
Killed	30 september 2003
Lifespan	almost twenty one years
Made by	NEC
Units	18.3 million by the final shipments in march 2004
Killed by	DOS/V and Windows 95, which made the kanji hardware pointless

~ the slide ~

IBM Japan released DOS/V in 1990 and took the advantage away in software. anyway. DOS/V drew Japanese characters from font files loaded into memory on an ordinary VGA card, which meant a standard PC/AT clone could suddenly handle Japanese with no special silicon at all. In october 1992 Compaq put a DOS/V machine into the Japanese market at 128,000 yen against the cheapest PC-98 at 248,000. the argument stopped being about writing systems and became about price.

i saw this from a distance, mostly, windows 95 closed it. Once applications talked to the operating system instead of to the hardware, a developer had no reason to build a separate PC-98 version of anything. the platform's software library stopped being a reason to buy the platform. to be fair, NEC read the room and shipped the PC98-NX line in 1997, which used the old name over an ordinary Windows PC with none of the old compatibility underneath.

~ the day it died ~

this part you had to be in the US for, and i was not. The last real model was the PC-9821Ra43 in 2000, a 433 MHz Celeron inside an architecture designed around an 8086. NEC kept building PC-9821 machines for customers with factory equipment or accounting systems that could not be moved. stopped taking orders on 30 september 2003. Final shipments went out in march 2004. Extended support ran until 2010, so the platform spent its last seven years as an obligation.

~ the long tail ~

this part i was not really around for. anyway, the games are why anyone outside Japan knows the name now. the emulation scene around them is the main way that software still runs at all. A large part of the Japanese PC catalog from the late eighties through the mid nineties survives only as PC-98 disk images. Touhou began on the PC-98 across five games before it moved to Windows and became the thing it is now.

The wider point outlived the machine. anyway, for about a decade the writing system you used decided which computer you were allowed to buy. japan was large enough and rich enough to answer that by building a parallel industry rather than waiting. Everywhere else with a hard script waited for the software to catch up.

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