When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98
I had a non-PC PC -- a Tandy 2000. It was the first machine I ever programmed Lisp on.<p>There were lots of these back in the day -- systems with x86 processors that attempted to fill the PC&#x27;s niche and even ran DOS but were subtly incompatible. In the early 80s the IBM PC was not the clear winner yet, and the BIOS hadn&#x27;t been reverse-engineered, so there were attempts to come up with similar, but not quite compatible, designs to compete in the same market. By the release of the PC&#x2F;AT, the IBM architecture was pretty much unstoppable in its dominance.<p>The Japanese PC-incompatibles, like the NEC PC-88 and PC-98 series, hung on for a bit longer for a couple of reasons:<p>1) as explained in the article, displaying Japanese hiragana, katakana, and kanji had high resolution requirements that none of the standard IBM graphics adapters could really match until about the time VGA came out, and there was poor support in MS-DOS until the late 80s or so<p>2) the Japanese <i>liked</i> their special, idiosyncratic, very Japanese computer designs.<p>To the latter, there was an episode of <i>Pretty Samy</i> (a <i>Tenchi Muyo</i> spin off and magical girl parody) in which the villain was Biff Standard, a glasses-wearing software magnate who wanted to standardize all the world&#x27;s software. Obviously he was supposed to be Bill Gates, and there was a rising tide of anti-Microsoft sentiment at the time in the West as well... but the episode came out shortly after the release of Windows 95, the first consumer version of Windows to natively support Unicode and international encodings without a special build. After Windows 95 came out in Japan, there was much less of a need for products like the PC-98, and Japanese software <i>could</i> standardize on a plain PC architecture running Windows. Computer enthusiasts at the time felt the malaise of the closing of an era.<p>Even to this day, when you go PC shopping in Japan, you will find there is a hierarchy of preference among brands. Japanese retailers will promote the Japanese brands (e.g., Sony (now Vaio), Fujitsu, Panasonic, NEC) most prominently, followed by the non-Japanese Asian brands (Lenovo, Samsung) and finally the Western brands (HP, Dell). Apple gets a special pass because it&#x27;s pretty much the Louis Vuitton of electronics.