NEC PC-6000 Series

~ the obit ~

The PC-6001 did not come from the part of NEC that made computers. It was designed inside the television division of New Nippon Electric, a consumer-electronics subsidiary, with no connection to the microcomputer division that had already shipped the PC-8001 and was doing well out of it. That origin is visible everywhere in the machine. It expects a television rather than a monitor, and it starts software directly from a cartridge pushed into the expansion port, the way a console does. It went to market through the same appliance dealers that sold the company's rice cookers. The model number makes it look like a junior PC-8001. It was a different product from a different building, aimed at a different customer.

It went on sale on 10 november 1981 at 89,800 yen, built around a Z80-compatible uPD780C-1 with 16 KB of memory behind a chiclet keyboard. Where it was ahead of the room was sound. Most home machines of 1981 had a single beeper, and the PC-6001 came standard with an AY-3-8910 that BASIC could drive through a music macro language, so a child could make it play something on the first afternoon. A speech synthesizer built on the uPD7752 was available as an option and became standard on the successors. Around 150,000 PC-6001s shipped, a figure the Nikkei Sangyo Shimbun was reporting by the middle of 1983, and it acquired a nickname nobody had asked for: Papicon.

The end had nothing to do with any of that. By 1983, when New Nippon Electric was renamed NEC Home Electronics, NEC had four personal computer lines under development by four separate teams, and the internal collisions were becoming expensive. The company reorganized into two divisions, with the 8-bit home machines going to NEC Home Electronics and the 16-bit business line staying with the Information Processing Group, and the price of that tidiness was the PC-6000. Development was closed in favor of the PC-8800, which was pushed toward hobbyists, while business use was consolidated onto the PC-9800. The last machine, the PC-6001mkIISR, went on sale on 15 november 1984. NEC's own hundred-year history is unusually blunt about it, and the phrase that survives translates as an unwilling end.

None of these machines were sold in Turkey, so this is assembled from Japanese sources rather than remembered. The part that carries is the failure mode, because it is the one that keeps happening. This product was not beaten. It had a customer and a sound chip nobody else could match at the price, and it was closed anyway, because it was becoming a problem for a sibling line inside the same company. Anybody who has watched a roadmap review knows the shape of that meeting. The question on the table stops being whether the thing works and becomes whether it fits, and the answer to the second question is decided by people who are not going to be in the building when the first one gets asked again.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

NEC sold the PC-6001 through two entirely different channels at once. The specialist route was the Bit-Inn stores and the NEC Microcomputer Shops, which is where the PC-8001 crowd went, and the other route was the ordinary home-appliance dealers that a consumer-electronics subsidiary already had on the books. That second channel is the one that mattered. It put a programmable computer next to washing machines, in front of families who had never walked into a computer shop and were not going to.

The machine was specified for that audience. Compared with the PC-8001 the functions were held back or left out, on purpose, in exchange for a price roughly two thirds of what the business machine cost. It was aimed at education and at play, which in 1981 Japan were understood to be the same market.

~ the Arabic one ~

Two versions left Japan. North America got the PC-6001A, sold under the name NEC TREK with a typewriter keyboard replacing the chiclet one, along with an expander that took three cartridges at once because some games needed two. Neither the machine nor the name made any impression there.

The other one is stranger and almost nobody records it. An Iraqi state manufacturer called Al Warkaa produced an Arabic-language PC-6001. A Japanese television division's cheap home computer, localized for right-to-left script by a state enterprise, is not a footnote you expect to find in an eight-bit obituary, and it is a reminder that the export map of this era was drawn by trade agreements rather than by demand.

~ the actual end ~

Three machines carry the series. After the original came the PC-6001mkII on 1 july 1983 at 84,800 yen, with kanji and a typewriter keyboard, and then the PC-6001mkIISR on 15 november 1984 at 89,800. A sister line, the PC-6600, ran alongside with a floppy drive in the case, and its own last machine appeared on the same day as the mkIISR.

After that there is nothing, and there was never an announcement. The series simply stopped receiving successors while the shops kept selling what they had. That is how most hardware lines actually die, which is why the date in this grave is the date the last machine went on sale rather than any date a company published.

~ what got buried with it ~

What the PC-6000 was carrying, and what NEC did not transfer anywhere, was the idea that the cheap machine should be the loud one. The sound hardware on a 89,800 yen home computer in 1981 was better than the sound hardware on machines costing three times as much, because the division that built it thought of audio as a consumer feature rather than a technical one. Chiptune histories still go back to this line for that reason.

NEC's answer to the home market afterward was to make the PC-8800 hobby-facing, which meant a more capable machine at a much higher price, and the bottom of the range was quietly conceded. It went to the MSX consortium and then to the Famicom. NEC did not return to a cheap machine for the living room until it built a games console, and by then it was 1987.

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