Hitachi Basic Master

~ the goodbye ~

For most of my life Hitachi was a hard drive. That is what the name meant on a Turkish hardware forum in the middle of the 2000s, where everybody's signature listed their parts and half of those lists had a Deskstar in them, a brand Hitachi picked up when it bought IBM's drive business in 2003 along with the reputation that came attached. I had no idea the company had shipped Japan's first personal computer, twenty years before I got a modem.

The MB-6880 was announced in september 1978 at 198,000 yen. Inside was an HD46800, Hitachi's own build of the Motorola 6800, with a monitor program and BASIC in a pair of 4 KB mask ROMs and 4 KB of RAM that went to 32. It put 32 characters across 24 lines onto a domestic television through a standard video interface, and it saved to an ordinary cassette recorder with named files, which sounds trivial and was not in 1978.

Both of the companies people actually remember for this era came later. Sharp's MZ-80K and NEC's PC-8001 followed the Basic Master into the Japanese market, and each of them ended up meaning more to it. Hitachi kept the line running for seven years across eight models, dropping the price to 89,800 yen for the Basic Master Jr of december 1981 and pushing it back up to 298,000 for the Level 3, chasing a home market and an engineering market with the same product family.

Reading this from outside Japan and forty years late, the shape is instantly familiar to anybody who has worked at a large company. A division ships something genuinely first, the corporation does not reorganize itself around the fact, and the position is gone within two product cycles while everybody who understood what they had watches it happen. Hitachi built the machine and then went on being Hitachi, which had several hundred other things to do.

~ the chronicle ~

~ first is not a position ~

Being first in a hardware market only pays if you convert the head start into software, and software is the one thing the manufacturer does not control. The Basic Master line kept changing shape underneath its developers. Level 2 landed four months after Level 1, and by 1980 the Level 3 had branched off into its own sequence of revisions that ran to the Mark 5 of may 1983. That is a great deal of movement for a platform trying to convince a games publisher it is worth targeting.

NEC did the opposite thing and won with it. The PC-8001 and the PC-8801 sat still long enough for a catalog to accumulate, and once the catalog existed the hardware comparison stopped mattering. By 1983 Hitachi was shipping an MSX machine, the MB-H1, which is what a company does when it has decided its own platform is not going to make it.

~ the last one was the best one ~

The MB-S1 of may 1984 is the machine the Japanese retro scene still argues about. It stayed compatible with the Level 3 while running a 6809 behind a custom memory management LSI, which broke the 64 KB address limit and reached a megabyte. It was measurably faster than the PC-8801 and the FM-7, and in some benchmarks faster than 16-bit machines that cost more.

It did not matter. The S1 arrived into a market where the buying decision had already been made on catalog depth, and the catalog was not there. Hitachi got respect for it, sold some, and closed the eight bit line behind it in 1985. The 16-bit era at Hitachi continued under a different name entirely.

~ what replaced it ~

In 2015 the National Museum of Nature and Science in Tokyo registered the Basic Master Level 3 as an important historical resource for science and technology. That is the correct ending for this machine. It was never going to be remembered by the people who bought one, because not enough of them did, so it got remembered by an institution instead, filed under the thing it unambiguously was.

The rest of the inheritance is invisible. Hitachi kept making the semiconductors and later the drives, and stayed one of the largest industrial companies on earth without ever needing the personal computer business at all. Somewhere in that is the reason it lost: the Basic Master was a product to Hitachi and a company to NEC.

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