Wow… 😮 As a japanese born in 1986 who’s been using computers as an essential tool, this video hit me. Your research on overseas topics like this is incredibly deep and convincing, as always! 👍 いつもながら、すごいよ、春日大社のシカさん！ 🦌^^

Weirdly enough, Epson still makes PCs but only sold in Japan. The whole world knows that they're a printer company.

FWIW, the V in DOS/V stands for "video", since DOS/V uses graphics display modes to show text instead of PC-native text modes which have no glyphs for CJK character sets. Thus, "doss-vee", not "doss-five".

A few years later, Toshiba laptops took Europe by storm. Toshiba had some great laptops.

ZUN cranked out five games for the PC-98, he only stopped and moved onto Windows because everyone else in Japan did too in that timeframe.

Thanks for the history lesson. I worked for NEC Technology in the US designing WinTel PCs from 1990-94. It was a good run for a while. We had an advantage because we were able to partner with the NEC monitor division back in the CRT days. But alas never gained significant market share and by the mid 1990s the handwriting was on the wall.

man, this era of computer development is fascinating to me, and i really appreciate you diggin thru whatever documentation you were able to find to get a perspective outside of the relatively small window i usually come across (that being the UK and US and their distinct computer markets in the early 80s).

I was living in Tokyo in the 1990s and saw this first-hand. In 1992 Fujitsu FM-Towns, Sharp X-68000 were interesting alternatives to PC-9801 and DOS/V. I had carried a Mac IIcx + 13" monitor in my luggage so was 5-10 years ahead of Wintel while I was there. Color Macs were pretty expensive in the early 1990s but got more affordable with the LC series, especially the LC III in '93-94. But Windows 95 came through and everything soon went with that, making the Mac's advantage over 16-bit OSs irrelevant.

in 1981 I was on a business trip to Tokyo. While shoehorned into my Japanese business hotel room I surfed Japanese television. I was blow away with two channels devoted to basic programming in prime time. While at home (US) there was none. we were running CP/M on homemade hardware trading programing tips in dark back alleys. Wow did things change. Up until the mid 90's if you bought computer peripherals for Ham Radio made in Japan it was totally incompatible at a hardware level as the US serial ports were RS-232, japanese peripherals were TTL made for Japanese computers.

The hard lesson: ALWAYS focus on software. Hardware is simply a means to an end, and he who controls the software controls the platform. That's why Microsoft was always the real winner in the end.

FYI: DOS/V means "Disk Operating System/VGA", not DOS 5.

My goodness, that advert from 1983 with the shirtless guy is certainly something! Thanks for making another great video. I hadn't thought of NEC in years.

I would point out that the TK-80 was not the first kit to have this form factor. That would have been MOS Technology's KIM-1 which was the direct inspiration for the TK-80's design.

Reason NEC PC-98 failed: No custom chipset for PC-98. During the critical 1985-1990 period, IBM-AT compatible clones get cheaper and cheaper by year due to so-called integrated PC "chipet" solution. The PC "Chipsets" from companies like Chips and Technology (NEAT chipset for PC-AT clone) reduced cost of PC clones like COMPAQ greatly. Chip count and cost for PC-AT compatible motherboard and graphic card were reduced drastically during that period. But PC-98 could not enjoy such cost reduction from such integrated chipset solution due to its incompatibility with PC-AT hardware. So PC-98 hardware was way more expensive to make than PC clones with DOS/V.

I remember the invasion of Japanese computers in 1981. They were priced wrong, though. One Sharp PC cost as thirty ZX81. I can say, they were more expensive than the original IBM PC with the 8088 - and still they hadn't an hard drive, and had its own flavor of BASIC. But the cause of failure was that the Japanese sold you the PC, with no software assistance. Offices and companies were looking to automate accountancy or some manufacturing process, and there were no offers of software writing, or interface cards from the Japanese companies. They pretended to sell PC like they were high-end HiFi equipment - which they were selling tons of at the time. Thanks for the video. Regards, Anthony

So much promise! The Sharp x68000 is a good example of a direction we might have gone, but economics is tough, and this shows how challenging the meteoric rise of worse-is-better in the 90s computer market would have been to predict.

It is super ironic. Back in the 80s the dominant IT question was ‘Who will build the super computer, US or Japan?’.

Now I want to go play with PC98

It'll be nice to know more about Toshiba's journey from being the first to introduce the laptop to pretty much exiting the laptop business a few years back.

My US company bought an NEC APC for evaluation in ~1982, before it was clear that IBM PC compatibility would be an essential characteristic. I got to take it home, where I learned how to program the graphics, PIC, and UART. I wrote a bunch of terminal emulators for all the DEC, DG, Pr1me, Tektronix, SEL, and other miscellaneous minis we used. Loved that thing, especially the 8" 1.2 mb floppy disks.

Thank you for the nice video. Good old days. We used to call PC-DOS that handles Japanese characters on IBM compatibles "DOS vee" (or more precisely "DOS-bui" in Japanese pronunciation of "V"), but not "DOS five". This new version of DOS opened up Japanese closed PC market to the world and liberated us from the dictatorship of NEC.

I have read that the “V” in DOS/V stands for VGA, not 5.

Bit-inn lived on as kind of a joke. The Mospeada anime c.1983 had a video called "Live at PIT-Inn" referencing both the Bit Inn and a pit (hole in the ground), part of the anime storyline. It's a pun of sorts. Well, it is if you know about the Bit-inn.

Excellent recap, thanks! (DOS/V is pronounced "Doss Vee")

The significance of bitmapped screens vs character-generater based screens CANNOT be over-emphasized. And DOS 5 was the epitome of IBM’s OS. 6.22 tweaked it. But DOS 5. . . Oh, my.

I worked for a US based calculator sales and service center for Canon USA. Canon had a lot of desktop programmable calculators in the 70's. Wire wrap, punch cards, magetic strip cards and floppy disks as they bridged between calculators and computers. The typewriter division even made dedicated word processors. Canon was also responsible for Jeff Raskin's Canon Cat his second Macintosh. Canon was also heavily invested in Steve Job's Next. I find it amazing how many pies Canon has had their hands in.

“At the time”.. . I was certainly aware of Japan’s stress on bitmapped rather than character-based displays. In the end, I think this was to everyone’s advantage. I had my own fun at the time decoding Xerox 9700 bitmapped fonts and manipulating them. . . Slanting, embolding, rotating, etc. . .

I've always wanted to learn the history behind NEC and the legendary pc98. Thanks so much for this one, Asianometry!

Excellent video, as always. Learned many details I was not aware of as I always do with your content. Looking forward to more.

The IBM PC was actually little better than existing PCs of the time. In theory the 8088 was a faster chip, but in practice it didn’t fare well against 2MHz 6502 or 4MHz Z80 machines. The reasons for it taking off were the IBM name and the well documented hardware and software platforms (which allowed 3rd parties to develop custom hardware and software). The result was a circle where people bought it (or clones) because of the available hardware and software, which caused more manufacturers to develop for it, which caused more users to buy it etc. Intel were lucky in being there at the right time. Technically the 8088 was second rate, and if IBM hadn’t picked it then it would have vanished into obscurity.

I love messing around with NEC PC 88/98, FM Towns and Sharp X68000 emulators. To me this was a magical time in the development of home computers and PC gaming. So many great software houses came and went, while a few have withstood the test of time, such as Falcom. Thank you for the fascinating history lesson.

Unlike the warring states, none of Japan's PC platforms were able to consolidate power. There were some absolutely legendary platforms though. PC88, Sharp X68000, and MSX had some fantastic gaming capabilities!

I’m very interested in many Japanese PCs because they’re really fun to look at while messing around and playing with them. Plus my favorite ones are MSX, Sharp X1, Nec Pc-8801, Fujitsu Micro-7, Sord M5, Hitachi S1, Sony Smc-777 and many others as well

Not a word about the very popular MSX computer at that time in Japan that was sold there until 1992. The games from Konami came first out on the MSX computer and later for other computers and games consoles.

Thanks for this video, as a current employee of NEC this has been educational

There is an animation called “16-bit sensation” which the story is set in 1990’s Japan. It shows us the fall of PC98 and the rise of Windows system. While the animated version differs from the original comic but the background is quite the same. For those who are interested in Japan’s PC market in 1990s, I recommend “16-bit sensation“.

I remember writing a Z80 Assembler/Disassembler in BASIC on the Sharp MZ80K, back in England in the 80's. Were Sharp not big enough to mention in Japan?

I love your videos, well reserached and they are about topics, I never thought about, but I'm interested in.

I have two of the HP palmtop PCs and these run NEC V20s. I also had an Epson desktop at work in the mid 80s and it ran an NEC V30.

Great video! I owned a Sharp X1 and then an EPSON clone, but every friend had different model, so I had much fun porting games in BASIC or Assembly for a model to another as a teenager. By the way, we in Japan at the time used to read DOS/V as Dosu bui not Dosu 5 :)

I do so enjoy the history I did not know I wanted to know found on this channel. Bravo, always!

We had a brief interlude of a software which acted similarly to the DOS V operating system. In 1993, WordPerfect 6.0 was released, building on the success of the 5.1 version. WordPerfect 6.0 easily switched from text-mode to a graphical mode, like the DOS/V did. In this mode, WordPerfect 6.0 displayed all the fonts, bold, italic fonts graphically. But it was slooow...

One of these days I'd love to hear a long format video like this on the microwinchester hard disk market of the 1980s. Wild west of design right there and it was all just about over by 1994. All spurred on by one drive: The Seagate ST-506.

As I understand it Mac OS supported Japanese quite early on and they had a cult following in Japan, especially for laptops with some Japan only models being very collectable today. Because the system was a bitmap driven display from day one it had a big advantage over DOS. They were much more expensive than the PC machines.

I had an NEC APC3 for a while, a really nice machine, it's colour graphics left the PC in the dust at the time. Strangely it used a stock Intel 8086 processor, I popped in an NEC V30 for a bit of extra performance, seemed strange that they didn't use their own chips, as it had zero comparability issues. This machine was a MS-DOS machine, as opposed to an IBM clone, so it didn't run most IBM software - not an issue for me at the time, however near the end of it's life that started to be an issue. NEC eventually brought out the 'SLE' card, or 'Software Library Expander', that was an IBM PC 'coprocessor' I mainly wrote my own software, usually with Turbo Pascal, often with an amateur/ham radio flair - RTTY, radio fax etc. I never could understood why the IBM PC came out with so low-res graphics at the time. I've seen several early-ish NASA photo's that show them using NEC APC's, the predecessor to the APC3, so obviously NASA saw them as the superior choice. As a side, a work colleague asked me if I'd like some software for it, of course I said yes. The next day he came in with a box of floppies containing Autocad among others, he walked into the local NEC dealers, grabbed a box of blank disks of the shelf, then proceeded to back-up the hard drive of the shops demo machine, then left after paying the price of a box of blank disks.... That bloke had 'balls', I'd never get away with such a stunt.

As a foreigner who has lived and worked in IT in Japan from 1985 to 1995 I thoroughly enjoyed your coverage of those pioneer and hectic days... Good job, sir :)

This is such a great channel, I always learn a lot from watching your videos - THANK YOU!

The NEC V-series seemed to do okay in the embedded market. Psion used the V30 in their Workabout mobile devices until the 2000s when they switched to CE. The Korg M1 synthesizers used a V50 as the main processor, and apparently some of the Akai S-series samplers did too.

IIRC I once used a Sanyo "PC compatible" from back in those days, also an all-in-one Sanyo CP/M machine.

My first computer was "Ai Business Computer 20" (ABC-20), Z80, 64KB, running DOSKET operation system.

Question: Why was the famed MSX computer no trace of a success at its time? Maybe rather a game console, but surely a promising multi-company project.

Man it would be so rad to program on one of these early models. The aesthetic design is so much better than anything modern.

What was the real story behind vector graphics pc. We had one in the Navy for parts ordering on the USS Eisenhower. Not sure why our electronics group had it

Japan had two international hits in the early 1980s, the Epson HX-20 and a bit later in 1983 the Tandy Model 100 (actually made by Kyocera). Both were astonishingly well made by the standards of computers of the time, and had a mature consumer product feel like a camera or calculator. They were genuinely portable long-life battery-powered computers in an A4 format, and allowed groundbreaking uses in specific portable niches, but ultimately proved a bit of a dead end as more general-purpose computers took over. Both had great keyboards but were limited in the display department. The Epson had a four line by 20 character monochrome LCD display, while the Tandy/Kyocera upped this considerably to eight lines by 40 characters - enough for realistic text editing. The Epson HX-20 had a small dot-matrix printer built in.

Been waiting for this one out of all your "why X pc failed" videos. I love NEC games, I'm happy to hear you do a vidoc on them.

Seiko Epson as Brutus to NEC's Julius Caesar is some brilliance right there! "Et tu, Seikus Epsonus?"

I think it did better than most. According to wiki lasted until 2003. (another place said hardware was 2000) I remember reading about one last push on a final release from a mfg. Reminds me of when Radio Shack released the final TRS-80 Model 4d. If you look around. They talk about that being a final push too. If you really want to be smart about it. Macintosh just about failed too.

I have been thinking about this topic all week!

I have a NEC stereo receiver from 1989. That thing is a TANK! The build quality is phenomenal. It weighs darn near 30 pounds and is, truth be known, overengineered. NEC is like the company hardly anyone remembers.

I'd love to hear about MSX too!

Great video. I remember deploying NEC 6030/6060's in the early 2000s when we were still using corporate mainframe terminals. The good old days.

In 1998, Microsoft launched Windows 98 and the PC98 initiative. Coincidentally, on the same year, NEC phased out of their PC-98 platform and moved onto Windows 98 and the PC98 compatible PC. This was confusing to the entry level consumer; and was seen as secret retreat from the battlefield by experienced users, particularly NEC user groups. In 1998 Sony made a big hit with their VAIO series which eventually overtook NEC in the consumer PC arena.

As usual this is a very documented and precise story that you are counting us ! Maybe it would have been fair, to mention that the Japanese PC industry still lives through brands like VAIO or Panasonic Toughbook. And the vast adoption of MSX standard for 8 bit home computers in the 80’s

So I'm guessing this is in parallel to MSX? Or is it the same thing? I remember cartridge games on an old MSX machine, they were hard but fun!

I had a Sharp MZ-700 in Germany. Z80 Microprocessor. It must have been in 1984. Very limited. Luckily - being a student with limited money - I got a Sinclair QL around 1987. Still an island. But it had Psion Software for Text Processing, Spreadsheet etc. Nearly all the student work was done on this until 1991. Siemens (Nixdorf downturn must have started) had a computer plant in Augsburg from 1986. Later it was Siemens-Nixdorf and from 1999 Fujitsu-Siemens.

Despite not having native scrolling in 88/98, they had a lot of video games. They and the MSX microcomputers had many video game series premiered.

I actually use an NEC Multi-Speed (circa 1988) laptop semi-commonly as a notepad at work. I like that it doesn't have internet access so I'm not tempted to mess around when I should be working.

4:00 there were alot of microprocessor trainers made by different companies during the 70’s/80’s

I think all the non Windows/Apple computers were swept awayby the mid 90s - in the USA Commodore and Atari were dead by the early 90s. In the U.K Sinclair, BBC Micro etc also died out around the same time. In Australia, we had a local computer that was successful in the 80s- the Microbee. Also dead by the 90s!

I like to see you do a video on the TI83 calculator. They use a Z80 processor, and still costs 100 dollars, same price as they had sold when they came out. Your phone could run circles around it and it's cheaper.

At that time, one could go to Japan town and found all kind of PC components. Shops handed all kind of motherboards on racks. I knew they had a laptop that had a printer built-in.

The NEC V20 and V30 chips sold well here in Australia. They were a drop in replacement for 8088/8086 and were cheap. Just buy one, rip out the old chip and put in the nec one - everything runs faster :-) It helped extend the sales life of the xt One of our Adelaide-based manufacturer “Micro Byte” designed and built its own computer using the v30 as a differentiator from other ibm-pc clones.

DOS VEE not 5!!!

I was always fascinated by those PC-98 machines. Especially when I saw those wonderful PC-98 games. Even today they still look great. Thanks for filling in the background on these wonderful machines.

Finding the drivers for Japanese PCs can be a nightmare and often they are cut off and unavailable through the manufacturer after just 5 years.

Great video ! I’d be curious to see something similar about the Chinese side, especially how support for Chinese characters came about in PRC and Taiwan.

I believe in the early 90’s the company I worked for imported an pick and place machine for putting parts on a pcb. It came with a “pc” as the controller but the floppy format was incompatible with US DOS floppy format. I tried for a while to get that machine to communicate with our systems so we could import design data but never succeeded.

There were some really great early hentai games on the PC 98 platform, some of them got ported to DOS and then windows and we sell updated versions of them today.

Waiting to hear the details on the SMIC 7nm process.

I would love video on Japanese PC gaming history, in terms of PC's made for or capable for gaming and the software companies that spawned to supply them.

Original NEC PC-9801 runs strategy game Nobunaga no Yabou of first released version, which was huge success and it served to increase user base. People not always install Ichitaro but most people uses ATOK of Justsystems as a FEP (Japanese IME) As a development environment, Boland C compiler was very popular instead of NEC genuine C compiler, IIRC Boland sells it for 50K yen while NEC sells it for 98K.

BTW, DOS/V stands for "Disk Operating System/VGA" (not "version 5"; DOS/V came out at approximately the same time as DOS 5).

This Kanji problem reminds me of the Predator movies and the fact the Predators can only see Infrared... so how did they manage to build technology and become advanced. Answer would be - alot of workarounds and an enormous amount of effort

I would like to see you make a video on the overseas development of Japanese PCs in relation to this video. (APC,8001/8801 and other models with A/B prefix released by NECIS and 8801/100/9801 for PRC, etc.)

My first PC was a Turbo XT clone with a NEC V-20 processor.

My first (IBM compatible) PC had an NEC V20 processor in it. They were used in Taiwan-manufactured computers exported to the west.

I remember when I lived in the States, a lot of Americans had Toshiba "Dynabooks". That was over a decade ago, and I was just a kid then, so I could have been wrong

In North America, we didn't start seeing 486 processors available to consumers until around 1993 to 1994.

The Japanese hardware engineers were designing custom PC architectures but they were still reliant on Microsoft O.S. compatability or even the custom DOS variants which were based on Microsoft DOS instead of developing a custom proprietary O.S. in Japan when they had the very talented programmers who could do this at a time when they could have secured financial security for it.

today i really learned something. thank you!

Well researched and well presented.

3:33 Even early on, there were also some very good Japanese books explaining everything about TK-80 in the most simple way imaginable. One book, (which was shorter than 200 pages!) explained how to do basic soldering, functions and parameters of basic electronic components, which kits to buy, all about binary arithmetic, microprocessor architecture and command set, simple input output devices, and how to write simple programs in assembly language -- lots of amazingly useful information presented very, very economically. Quite a marvel -- unfortunately no English version exists, though Apple II manual was similarly awesome.

An excellent video, especially if you are into retro games and Japanese gaming microcomputers in particular.

In 1989-92 I worked for a company named Wilcom which produced CAD/CAM software for embroidery design. Wilcom exported this software to Japan and I still remember Wilcom's partner in Japan sent us a unit of Japanese IBM PC for testing. The unit looked different that the US and international version of IBM PC.

Funnily enough, my great grandfather worked for NEC in the 1910s as one of the American engineers brought from Western Electric. My grandfather (who was born in Tokyo) and grandma always had NEC computers, long after their PC business declined in Japan, let alone in the states

NEC V20 CPU has an 8 bit mode in hardware just for the sake of software compatibility with the previous model line.

Can you make a video on flash memory, why it take off, what difference are they with cpu semiconductors?

I worked at Fujitsu America on their Fujitsu Micro-16 PC, and a 32bit design based on Intel 80386. The bane of our existence was Fujitsu's PHOBIA of using IBM PC Compatible BIOS. Going it alone with a Proprietary BIOS made it incompatible with most IBM PC Clone Compatible Software. The Kiss of Death. Why? Fujitsu lost about $1 Billion to Court Judgments for copying the IBM Mainframe software, and did not dare risk another such judgement. Half of that for Fujitsu's Mainframe division, and half for the Amdahl Mainframe company, which Fujitsu bought. Really there was no risk, since the 'Clean Room' method of 'Emulating' a competing software had been proven in US Courts. Quelle Dommage!

I am particularly impressed by the NEC APC which it’s first iteration came out a year before the PC-9801 in 1981, in the same IBM released the 5150. it had an 8086 just like the PC (which actually had an 8088) but certainly better graphics and sound capabilities than the CGA graphics and speakers of the pc. But it also had the capability to shut down itself through software which is insane because IBM compatible pcs only gained that feature with the release of the ATX standard and ACPI/APM power management 15 years after the release of the APC

my first pc was a NEC 486!! they had really great name brand recognition for quality then still but definitely shrunk fast