NEC announced the 6000 series in 1981. Developed by The Electronic Devices Group of Nippon Electric, a subsidiary of NEC, they were designed as a series of new low-cost microcomputers following the success of the PC-8001 series of machines. The 6000 machines were one of four lines of machines coming out of four different divisions.

The PC-6001 runs on the NEC clone of the Z80 processor. It has a three voice sound generator, ROM cartridge slot, cassette interface, two Atari style joystick ports, a parallel printer connector, and RF and composite outputs for video. It has 16K of RAM, which can be upgraded to 32K.

The first version of the machine has chiclet style keys, while the later MKII and American version use a full travel keyboard.

The MKII was a considerable upgrade, which as well as the keyboard, had 64K of RAM, a floppy drive interface, kanji character generator, a speech synthesizer, and improved graphics resolutions.

Manufacturer: NEC
Date: 1981

This exhibit has a reference ID of CH63121. Please quote this reference ID in any communication with the Centre for Computing History.

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