NEC PC-9801

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The NEC PC-9801 (or the PC-98 for short) is a Japanese microcomputer manufactured by NEC. It first appeared in 1982, and employed an 8086 CPU. It ran at a clock speed of 5 MHz, with two µPD7220 display controllers (one for text, the other for video graphics), and shipped with 128 KB of RAM, expandable to 640 KB. Its 8-color display had a maximum resolution of 640x400 pixels. Its successor, the PC-9801E, which appeared in 1983, employed an 8086-2 CPU, which could selectably run at a speed of either 5 or 8 MHz. In the 80s, more than 60% of the PCs sold in Japan were PC98. In 1990,Japan IBM introduced DOS/V which enabled to display Japanese text on ordinary IBM PC/AT's VGA adapter. After that, the fall and declining of PC98 began. The PC-9801's last successor is the Celeron-based PC-9821Ra43 (with a clockspeed 433MHz), which appeared in 2000.

FreeBSD/pc98 runs on PC-9801s equipped with an i386 or compatible.

The PC98 is different from the IBM PC in many ways; for instance, it uses its own 16 bit C-Bus instead of the ISA bus; BIOS, I/O port addressing, memory management and graphics output are also different. However, localized MS-DOS or Windows will still run on PC-9801s.

Seiko Epson manufactured PC-9801 clones, as well as compatible peripherals.