The IBM PC debuted in August 1981, quickly dominating the Western market and establishing a standard whose elements still persist today. On the other side of the world, however, the story was very different. Neither the IBM PC nor its main clones could meet the demands of the Japanese market, and that space was filled by NEC with the launch of its PC-9801 in October 1982, beginning the local dominance of the PC-98 platform.
History tells us that Commodore (under the wing of Jack Tramiel at the time) managed to introduce a variant of its PET computer into the Japanese market, featuring a keyboard and katakana character set. Shortly after, NEC announced its intention to enter the home computer market, and it was Tramiel himself who confirmed that after that announcement, his sales “dropped by 99 percent.”
In other words, the Japanese market wanted a computer that adapted to its requirements. The IBM PC simply lacked adequate specifications: the character set on a Western machine had 256 elements, but when you combine all Japanese systems, that number skyrockets to about 50,000—not to mention the high-definition video needed to display them on screen.
Today we can say that NEC's response came in three phases: first with the PC-8001 in May 1979, then with the PC-6001 and the PC-8801 in November 1981 (which was a true sales success), and finally the PC-9801 from October 1982… which conquered everything in its path.
NEC PC-98: A PC with a Japanese Touch
The original NEC PC-9801 came equipped with a NEC µPD8086 chip (a clone of the Intel 8086) running at 5 MHz, 128 kilobytes of RAM (expandable to 640 KB), and two NEC µPD7220 display controllers, managing text and graphics respectively. This gave the PC-9801 a maximum resolution of 640 × 400 pixels and 8 colors. It was also backward compatible with peripherals and accessories from the earlier series, including monitors, floppy drives, and software written for N88-BASIC. As if that weren't enough, it could run special ports of MS-DOS, and the option to install a ROM chip dedicated entirely to kanji enabled the use of Japanese word processors, among other applications.
However, using an x86 processor and running DOS did not make the PC-98 a “100% compatible” platform with IBM PC. The technical differences were significant:
- NEC implemented its own 16-bit Bus-C instead of ISA.
- RAM could be expanded with a combination of proprietary daughterboards and SIMMs, setting a ceiling of 14.6 megabytes. The PC-9821Af from 1993 was the first to accept conventional SIMMs.
- The hard disk partition table was proprietary.
- The BIOS, port addresses, and memory addresses were different.
- Supported floppy sizes were 640 KB (quad-density) and 1232 kilobytes in 3.5, 5.25, and 8 inches.
- The assignment of drive letters depended on the boot device, so a hard drive loaded with MS-DOS always appeared as A instead of C.
- The video system was a different beast. In 1985, NEC managed to extend the color palette to 4096. This made the PC-98 platform very popular in game development… especially erotic visual novels.
In short, the PC-98 platform proved that it was possible to create something different from the typical generic IBM PC clone, offering specific improvements in graphics while also providing enough compatibility for other ecosystems (basically MS-DOS and Windows). By 1989, NEC already dominated half of the Japanese market, and PC-98 managed to survive until September 2003, completing a cycle with more than 18 million units sold.
Sources: Scali's Open Blog, Strange Comforts, IPSJ, Wikipedia
