The NEC PC 8801 was the successor of PC 8001. It offered fine colour graphics.
It had an optional MS-Dos board. It was one of the fist, if not the first color CPM computer.
It ran in three bootable modes: CPM, MS-Dos, and N88-Basic. The N-Basic would natively boot on the system without disk, just like the PC 8001. It also had a software / hardware switch to turn it into PC 8001 mode.
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The NEC PC-8801 was released in North America. It was called the NEC PC-8801A. I should know, I own one. I will eventually upload a video of it on YouTube, just the hardware I will need to eventually get the correct monitor before I could even think about the software. I have the 8" drives. I''m not sure if the 5 1/4" drives were released in North America.
Tuesday 15th November 2022
SL (United States)
Personally I''m surprised that this system was not released outside of Asia because it was very powerful in its later years with FM sound and full colour graphics and if it was released it would have probably buried the IBM PC
Tuesday 26th May 2020
James (Ireland)
I was in the Air Force stationed in Japan (Misawa Air Base), and I bought the PC-8801n in Aomori, Japan with my reenlistment bonus in April 1982. The manuals were all in Japanese, so I hadn''t really been able to use it to its full potential. I used it for the next five years until I bought a Dell System 25, but the PC-8801 (now my secondary computer) lasted for about 12 years (until 1994) when it became inoperable due to the post office damaging the 8" dual drive when I shipped it from one duty station (Key West) to the next (Hawaii).
