The NEC PC8801 was the followup from the NEC PC8001. It was distributed in west Europe by NEC Neuss Germany. These even manufactured computer furniture to be bought by complete systems. In the U.K. this was also a well know model in the marked of office equipment. The PC8801 had 2 basic interpretors in ROM, at first the bill gates written N-basic from Microsoft and second the very special Microsoft N-88 basic with extended commands for graphics etc.
You could load CP/M operating system by discette. At first the CP/M from the PC8001 computer, and later also CP/M in PC8801 mode.
In GB was at last also availble separate double DS/DD 8 inch discette station. The discettes had 1,2 Mb capacity in this format. Also was available a harddisk station from Japan for these computers. It''s brand was Anritsu, and the capacity was 10 Mb.

In America was another development going, also selden sold in Europe, the famous APC computer.
This was a more IBM compatible model, with build in
2 x 51/4 inch discette stations. The APC was the counterpart for the Northstar pc''s.

only link for available software
http://www.frimu.nl/bu/nec.htm

It was definitely released in the US. My folks bought one in 1982 or 1983. I learned to program on it in BASIC, Pascal, and Z80 Assembly.

It went from sibling to sibling until it finally was sent to me sometime in the 90s. It still functioned as late as a year ago when I finally donated it to a museum rather than move it across country with me. :-) By the time I got it back from a sibling, you could emulate a Z80 processor in software faster than the NEC would run it, but... I still have fond memories of all the hours I spent in front of it during my high school years, though.

I bought a PC-8801 in Canada and used it from 1984 to 1990, with an NEC "Spinwriter" printer, and a pair of 5.25" disk drives, CP/M WordStar (with MailMerge) and MultiPlan.

I didn''t buy the MS-DOS board (it was only available with DOS 1.25) and heard later that, in contrast to the PC-8801 itself, the MS-DOS board was very troublesome.

I also used code and circuit diagrams supplied by NEC to write a driver that used the 48K graphics memory as a rAM disk, a utility that would convert 5.25" diskettes from N88-Basic format to CP/M format and back, and a file manager that would automatically recognize MS-DOS and CP/M diskettes and treat them as if they were all CP/M diskettes. All of these were posted on a bulletin board run by Ryugen Fisher, who gave me some useful advice and coaching.

It was a very good computer and, at the time, well-supported by NEC Home Electonics in the USA.