Playing in the Club: The Epson PC286C PC-Club #Retro #Retrocomputing

In the early 1980s NEC realised they needed to move on from their popular 8-bit 8800 series of computers. This time they wouldn't use the Zilog Z80 that had successfully powered so many of their previous machines and they would, instead, follow the rising home computer range and produce machines based on the x86 architecture. This proved to be an excellent move and grew NECs market share even more and this success attracted the eyes of other companies and much like IBMs dominance generated clone machines, so did NECs. Enter Seiko Epson. Thus far they hadn't achieved much success in the computer market and had, in the end, decided to make IBM clones to attain some market share although mostly in countries outside of Japan. This decision caused a schism in the companies management, with many feeling they were ignoring their home market. And so, in 1986, they started development of a computer compatible with the PC-98 specification. To begin with they concentrated on making machines th