PC-8000 series

The PC-8000 series (Japanese: PC-8000シリーズ, Hepburn: Pī-Shī Hassen Shirīzu) is a line of personal computers developed for the Japanese market by NEC. The PC-8001 model was also sold in the United States and Canada as the PC-8001A.

Original models of the NEC PC-8001B (or sometimes the NEC PC-8000) were also sold in some European countries like in the UK, France, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands and in Australia and New Zealand as well.

The first member of the PC-8000 series, the PC-8001 was first introduced on May 9, 1979, and went on sale in September 1979 for ¥168,000. Its design combines the keyboard and the mainboard into a single unit. At a time when most microcomputers were sold as "semi-kits" requiring end user assembly, the fully assembled PC-8001 was a rarity in the market. Peripherals included a printer, a cassette tape storage unit, and a CRT interface. Although it is often believed to be the first domestically produced personal computer for the Japanese market, it was preceded by both the Hitachi Basic Master [ja] and the Sharp MZ-80K [ja].

The PC-8001A was released in the United States in August 1981, and was priced at US$1,295 (32 KB of RAM). It is modified to reduce electromagnetic interference to comply with FCC regulations. The Katakana glyphs in the character ROM (see JIS X 0201) are replaced by Greek alphabet.

The PC-8001 has an NEC μPD780C-1 (Z80-compatible processor) clocked at 4 MHz, 16 KB of RAM (expandable to 32 KB), CRT video output, cassette port, parallel port for a printer, serial port and an expansion bus. The built-in BASIC interpreter, called N-BASIC, fits in 24 KB of ROM. This is a variant of Microsoft Disk BASIC 4.51. Optional DISK BASIC allows disk I/O for an external floppy drive. The video output is provided by an NEC μPD3301 CRT controller and a μPD8257C (Intel 8257 clone) DMA controller. It has various text modes, and the maximum screen is 80×25 text with 8×8 pixel font. Each character has two attributes chosen from blinking, highlight, reverse, secret, vertical line, over line, under line and eight colors (3-bit RGB hardware color palette), and up to 20 different attributes per line can be set. The attribution also supports semigraphics, and each characters have a 2×4 matrix.

The PC-8011 Expansion Unit provides additional capabilities and interfaces, which has 32 KB RAM sockets for μPD416 DRAMs, 8 KB ROM sockets for 2716 PROMs, an interrupt controller, an interval timer, a serial port, a floppy drive controller, a parallel port and an IEEE-488 port. Original floppy disk drives for the PC-8001 are the dual-unit PC-8031 and the additional dual-unit PC-8032, which use 143 KB single-sided 5.25-inch format. They were followed by the single-unit PC-8031-1V, the dual-sided PC-8031-2W and PC-8032-2W. These units are attached to the PC-8001 through the PC-8011 or the PC-8033 adapter.

In Japan, Nippon Electric's Microcomputer Sales Section in the Electronic Device Sales Division released the TK-80 in 1976, a single-board computer kit, and it became popular among hobbyists. American personal computers were expensive for personal use (Initial list price of the Apple II was 358,000 yen, Commodore PET was 298,000 yen, and the TRS-80 was 248,000 yen). In 1978, the Hitachi Basic Master and Sharp MZ-80K, both developed by consumer electronics companies, were released as personal computers targeted for hobbyists, not for business use.

In the summer of 1978, the Microcomputer Sales Section started developing the PC-8001, codenamed "PCX-1". The development team consisted of 10 engineers including section manager Kazuya Watanabe(engineer) [jp] (渡邊 和也) and chief designer Tomio Gotō (後藤 富雄). They had already planned to release a version of the TK-80BS within a plastic case as a personal computer. It was released as the COMPO BS/80, but it failed in the market due to its poor built-in BASIC and slow clock speed. The PC-8001 was intended to be a high-performance and inexpensive computer for personal use.