NEC PC-8800 Series

~ the last words ~

NEC announced the PC-8801 on 22 september 1981, on the same day it announced the PC-6001, and shipped it that december. It was the upmarket machine of the pair, upward compatible with the PC-8001 that came before it, and it could display 400 lines vertically, which is why NEC sold it with half an eye on business buyers. A Z80 clone of NEC's own manufacture ran it. Within a year NEC had also shipped the 16-bit PC-9801, and the 8801 quietly slid sideways into the position it would hold for the rest of the decade: the hobby machine, the one you bought if what you wanted to do with a computer was games.

It became the largest of those. Japanese magazines of the era named a big three of 8-bit home computers, and the PC-8800 was the first among them, with Fujitsu's FM-7 and Sharp's X1 behind it. By november 1983 it had shipped 170,000 units. By the end of march 1989 the cumulative figure was around 940,000, and by that september about 960,000. The PC-8801mkIISR of 1985 is the model that fixed its identity, and after that the series was simply where Japanese personal computer games came from. Ys and Thexder were both born on it, along with the Dragon Slayer line that ran out of the same studio.

NEC tried to move the series forward and failed at it. The PC-88VA of march 1987 was a 16-bit machine at 298,000 yen meant to carry the 88 name into the next generation, and it did not sell. In june 1989 NEC tried the other direction with the PC-98DO, one box that ran both 8800 and 9800 software, which was an admission dressed as a product. The last machine in the pure series was the PC-8801MC of november 1989, the only 88 ever built with a CD-ROM drive, and it could boot from it. New 8800 models were still arriving a full year after every other Japanese maker except MSX had abandoned 8-bit. The very last thing carrying the 88 architecture was the PC-98DO+, october 1990, and it was wearing a PC-98 badge.

I have never touched one. Nothing in the series was exported, so the hardware is invisible from where I sit in a way its software is not. Ys and Thexder were written on this machine and then ported outward until they landed on hardware that was actually sold here, with nothing on the box about where they came from. That is the ordinary end for a platform: the programs walk out and keep earning on whatever is selling, while the machine they were written for stays inside one border and then stops being built. Nine hundred thousand units is a large number, and it left no trace at all outside the country that bought them.

~ the record ~

~ the games came first ~

The reason the PC-88 mattered is that it was where Japanese developers wrote before they ported. Nihon Falcom built Ys on it. Game Arts built Thexder on it. If you have played a Japanese role-playing game or a scrolling shooter from the late 1980s on any platform at all, there is a reasonable chance the first version of it existed on a beige NEC box with two floppy drives in the front.

That position came from a split inside NEC. The PC-9800 was positioned as the business machine and priced accordingly, which left the 8800 as the one a teenager might plausibly end up with, and the software followed the teenagers. By the late 1980s the pull started reversing: simulation games with heavy calculation and adventure games with high-resolution art both wanted more machine than the 8801 had, and the developers moved up to the 98 to get it.

~ the sixteen-bit mistake ~

The PC-88VA in march 1987 was NEC trying to have it both ways. It was a 16-bit machine with a proper video display processor behind it, capable of 65536 colors at 640 by 200, and it cost 298,000 yen. It carried the 88 name and it was not really an 88, and it was not a 98 either. NEC shipped improved VA2 and VA3 models in march 1988 with better compatibility, and the whole branch died anyway.

What that failure bought NEC was clarity. If customers would not follow the 88 name onto new silicon, the 88 name had no future, and the only remaining job was to keep the existing customers inside NEC while they moved to the 98. Hence the PC-98DO in june 1989, which was a PC-9801 with an 88 hiding in it.

~ the last one ~

The PC-8801MC arrived in november 1989 at 169,000 yen for the base model, in an upright case, with a CD-ROM drive the machine could start from. In november 1989 an optical drive on an 8-bit home computer was an answer looking for a question, and it is a strange object to find at the end of a line: the most advanced thing NEC ever put in an 88 arrived in the last one, after the argument was already lost.

NEC kept selling 8-bit hardware a year longer than anyone else in Japan, which sounds like commitment and was closer to inertia. Nine hundred thousand owners is a large installed base to walk away from, and companies rarely do it in one motion. They ship a bridge machine, then a valedictory model carrying some feature nobody asked for, and the catalog quietly stops mentioning it after that.

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