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Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01YDRjtmAiNpo5mK5N3d7QwZ
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---
title: NEC APC
categories:
- Computers
types:
- Professional Computer
origins:
- Japan
years:
- '1982'
cpus:
- NEC UPD-8086
params:
name: APC
company: /companies/nec
company_name: NEC
specs:
- label: NAME
value: APC
- label: MANUFACTURER
value: NEC
- label: TYPE
value: Professional Computer
- label: ORIGIN
value: Japan
- label: YEAR
value: '1982'
- label: BUILT IN LANGUAGE
value: None
- label: KEYBOARD
value: Typewriter type, 61 key + 25 key numeric/cursor pad + 22 function keys
- label: CPU
value: NEC UPD-8086
- label: SPEED
value: 5 Mhz
- label: CO-PROCESSOR
value: NEC 7220 graphic chip, socket for a math co-processor
- label: RAM
value: 128 KB standard, 640 KB max.
- label: VRAM
value: Unknown
- label: ROM
value: 4 KB ROM, 4 KB battery-backed CMOS RAM
- label: TEXT MODES
value: 80 columns x 25 lines + 1 status line (8x19 dots character matrix)
- label: GRAPHIC MODES
value: 640 x 475 pixels
- label: COLORS
value: '8'
- label: SOUND
value: Buzzer
- label: SIZE / WEIGHT
value: 48.3 (W) x 61 (D) x 35.5 (H) cm / heavy!
- label: I/O PORTS
value: 1 or 2 x RS232 up to 19.200 baud, 1 x Parallel
- label: BUILT IN MEDIA
value: |-
2 x 8'' floppy disk drives (243 KB or 1 MB)\
Optional hard-disk (9 or 18 MB formatted)
- label: OS
value: CP/M-86, UNIX and MS DOS in option
- label: POWER SUPPLY
value: PSU built-in
- label: PERIPHERALS
value: 2nd RS-232 port, 32-bit floating point unit, Line drawing graphics subsystem, Very high resolution (1024x1024) , IBM emulation software, SDLC communication procedure
- label: PRICE
value: |-
Monochrome, single floppy : $3,298 (US, 1983)\
Monochrome : 27 800 FF (France, Dec. 83)\
Color, dual floppy : $4,998 (US, 1983)
tabs:
- photos
- adverts
photos:
- title: PROMOTIONAL PICTURE
subtitle: ''
text: ''
image: null
- title: RUNNING SYSTEM
subtitle: ''
text: |-
**Dick Leary**, the proud owner of this machine says:\
I bought this machine in 1983. It still works. I still have all documentation which was in hard cover binders and even included the engineering layouts for all the pcb boards. Very impressive.\
When I got the machine, I wanted to communicate with bulletin boards and MCI but there was no comm software so I wound up writing my own and used it for several years until buying an IBM clone(UG!).\
I also have a 10 meg hard drive which looks like a shoebox but at the time was state of the art. It was great machine in its day.
image: null
adverts:
- title: U.S. ADVERT (1982)
subtitle: ''
text: |-
As NEC american office wanted the APC to compete with the IBM PC. So they tried to do a pastiche of the [Charly Chaplin IBM advert](/museum/ibm-pc-model-5150/).\
It was not a good idea.
image: null
- title: 'U.S. ADVERT #2 (1982)'
subtitle: ''
text: As the first advert campaing was not a good idea, NEC of America replaced it with this one... which was not better
image: null
comments:
- author: Vaffangool (United States)
date: Sunday 21st March 2021
text: I have WordStar and Zork for the APC on 8" floppy, probably CP/M but could be MS-DOS
- author: Eliyahu Skoczylas (Jerusalem, Israel)
date: Sunday 20th January 2019
text: |-
I worked at a telecom startup in 1982-4. We all used these machines to do cross-platform software development for the custom switching equipment we were developing. Management chose them as our development platform because the dual 8" floppies had enough capacity for each of us to do a meaningful amount of work without needing hard drives.
We would use the first drive with MS-DOS and the Aztec C compiler, and the second drive would contain our development modules, source and object. Only the software librarian and one build machine had hard drives, almost a dozen coders were each on a floppy version. Plus, these machines would do compiles more quickly than a couple of other computers that we''d tried.
They were sturdy, workhorse machines.
- author: Pete Peterson (United States)
date: Thursday 11th October 2018
text: Aaah... this machine brings back memories! Back in the 80s, while Madonna was true blue and Reagan was playing brinksman, I was lugging one of these babies from company to company to install and maintain NEC NEAX2400 PBX systems. We affectionately referred to it as the "Wonk-Wonk" computer, owed to the sound it often emitted while searching floppies. It was big, heavy and built like a battleship. Larger customer bought one, but small NEAX2400 customers couldn''t afford the $6000 US price tag, so we brought our maintenance machine with us on installs. One night, after a long brutal cutover, I was leaving a savings and loan branch with My APC on a hand truck. I was cluncking down a set of concrete stairs when it broke loose! It tumbled down one flight, rounded the landing, and descended another entire flight. Oh Shit! I''m in big trouble, I though. I rushed to the scene, to find the machine largely in tact, with only a small crack in the case. I took it back to the lab, opened it
up, re-seated a couple of add-in cards, and it fired up fine! It was heavy and monstrous, but built like a battleship.
- author: Marcus Wigan (Melbourne australia)
date: Wednesday 10th January 2018
text: I have an APC, and the NCI P-system discs for it. the NCI version worked well.. Im still working on my apple Mac old machines \*128/se30/centris/ci etc)getting them all working with the original software.. soon ill be moving on to the aPC..and could really use more 8" software for itIt was working when I got it and i have not yet checked to see what manuals I might still have..but ill try and respond to any specific requests.!
- author: Nicholas Downing (Australia)
date: Tuesday 21st June 2016
text: I have the 128K colour dual floppy model, text only although you could load up to 256 custom characters into the CGRAM which could be used as a rudimentary graphics facility, my dad bought this mainly for word processing and business but although it moved between his factory/office and home at times it was mainly used as our family computer, effectively my personal hobby machine and I loved it. My friends had Commodore 64s, PETs, Dick Smith VZ200 and the like, I was jealous of their graphics and sound capabilities but on the whole I liked having a solid business machine running a good BASIC (we used MSDOS 2.11 with MS Basic-86 interpreter, I also dabbled with the compiler from time to time). I was not that competent in assembly language and the 7220 datasheet was gobbledegook to me at the time but I was always keen to try to switch the text card into graphics mode or obtain the graphics card for it. If anybody has such a card and could post to Australia for a nominal fee I would
love to try it out. Our machine had a minor fault which was probably temperature related but would only occur occasionally, however any replacement CPU card, etc, would also be more than welcome, as would any well known software since we had basically no software for the machine except what we ported ourselves, the main app we used was "Spellbinder" word processor running on a daisywheel that my father had rescued from scrap and fitted with a serial interface, he then created font tables etc for Spellbinder. Very awesome.
- author: Chris (New Jersey)
date: Sunday 20th March 2016
text: I had 2 of these, both gone, but still have all the cards, except for the CPU card. I even have the aftermarket Butler Flats Associates card that connects the machine to 5 1/4" disk drives. The s/w I never took the opportunity to archive, and sadly is unobtainium. If anyone has the drivers for this board, and/or the cpu card, please contact me. indiscreetlogic at yahoo dot calm
- author: Brian Empey, P.Eng. (Canada)
date: Wednesday 18th February 2015
text: |-
please correct the OS information on the NEC APC.\
These computers initially only came with the UCSD P-System\
Then later (in 1981) CPM-86 was added.\
Then (after the IBM PC existed) MS-DOS was eventually ported.
I wrote almost a million lines of Pascal code for a complete CADD system that successfully competed against AutoCAD at the time. It was called "Arthur"
The color graphics board came with 512k bytes of RAM, as 3 banks of RGB 1024x1024 pixels (128k per color plane) plus 128k general RAM.\
Plus 768k main memory.\
Plus a monochrome video (text) card also running an NEC uPD-7220 chip, but running in text mode.
In Canada, fully loaded (dual 8" floppies, 1-1/4 Megs of RAM, but without the math co-processor or HD) they cost $8,500 each. That was 1981.
- author: Terry (AU)
date: Saturday 27th December 2014
text: |-
I have a few 5 1/4 and 8 " disks from various systems including the NEC APC''s DOS and CP/M with OK and other programs.\
They were great as was the Canon CX3 range etc
- author: Ron Potter (Manchester WA / USA)
date: Friday 8th February 2013
text: |-
For awhile the NEC Advanced Personal Computer was the featured player in our business by virtue of being one of the first systems to do a good job with Autodesk''s AutoCAD. In fact, we thought it was the best solution at the time when it becamet available, and so did Autodesk.
We set up the first architect in Anchorage Alaska with CAD, and did a bit of business with engineers, but mostly they were stuck with their DEC and other minis. We got out of it when Autodesk demanded we put an architect or engineer on our sales force just as the construction market collapsed in Anchorage.
I agree with negative comments about NEC''s marketing. I had lunch once with their US CEO, and told him that what they were doing with the APC was clueless, and he seemed to listen well, but nothing changed and the world moved on leaving NEC a mere footnote and it soon abandoned sales of PCs in the US. Guess they couldn''t get their mind off their super computers to pay attention to this low end market. That was the feeling I had.
You can see my old NEC APC/AutoDesk showroom at my website for the now closed Abacus North, http://www.abacus49.com/A49_History3.html.
Kind of wish my budget and circumstance had allowed me to keep one. I loved the old heavy beast.
Cheers!\
Keep on Remembering to Remember all the great bits about the early days of PCs.
- author: teigan annsaint (california)
date: Saturday 1st January 2011
text: i have one of these with the color graphics card. by the time i inherited it, there was no software to be bought anywhere. the original ucsd pascal discs worked, but that was painfully inefficient and slow. i managed to write a few simple graphics demos in assembly language, which proved how inept the geniuses at ucsd were. were all the available graphics apps as slow as the pascal compiler? i''m currently on a hunt for the CNC milling software.
- author: Philip Haynes (Australia)
date: Monday 15th November 2010
text: |-
This PC also used UCSD p-System (which wasn''t very good).
Of notability (in Australia) was it''s scientific word processor - OK editor (completely written in assembler). To this day it is still the best editor for scientific publications that I have used.
In Australia some very clever chappies whose name I cannot remember developed high performance graphics software with a very early version of TurboPascal.\
With this and the graphics card you had high resolution (two page) graphics.
It wasn''t till I got my Silicon Graphic''s personal Iris in 88 did I have a better machine.
- author: Stephen (New Zealand)
date: Monday 7th June 2010
text: Hi, I actually have one of these with the monochrome screen. It still goes and the disk drives spin when I put a disk in, but sadly I have no operating disk, just sixty odd disks containing some old data by the looks of them, and perhaps one or two programs.
- author: Mark Chandler (New York, NY)
date: Wednesday 9th July 2008
text: |-
Comments from a NASA/GISS senior scientists regarding the NEC APC:\
The NEC APC used Intel's newest 8086 chip, a 16-bit processor at 4.3 MHz. In most of our APC's we later added a NEC graphics board and an 8087 coprocessor for mathematical calculations. I wrote subroutines in 8086 assembly language to drive the APC's graphics board. We made latitude-longitude color plots and contour plots. \[We also used a\] tripod and Nikon camera and shot color slides from the APC screen; I still have some in my desk drawer. Later, Bob S. and I wrote software to drive an early IBM color ink jet printer from the APC.
- author: Mark Chandler (New York, NY, USA)
date: Tuesday 8th July 2008
text: Most of the top scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies had these computers on their desks throughout the 1980's for imaging and analysis of global climate model output (the climate simulations were run on IBM mainframes). Much of the climate model development as well as the analyses of early global warming studies that were done by Jim Hansen and his research group at NASA relied on these computers. The graphics software AND specialized text editors for dealing with the massive volume of Fortran GCM code were written in-house for these NEC APCs. I used them as a graduate student in the late 1980s while at NASA/GISS and there were still working APCs around GISS until about 2000 (but no more).
- author: Terry Payne (Australia)
date: Thursday 19th June 2008
text: I worked on these (in Perth, Australia) and still have 8" disks for MS dos 2.11 and CP/m 86 with sundry programs including OKwriter(?) a scientific word processor. Don't know if the disks still work though! Was a great system at the time. Like the Canon CX3 (also have disks) not appreciated at the time as the XT swept all before it.
- author: Mark Brindle (Earth)
date: Tuesday 13rd November 2007
text: |-
I had one of these and loved it. I wrote and sold a graphics library (written in Turbo Pascal), a character generator (remember the characters were all programable) as well as an accounting system.
I still have copies at home for my software but no way of reading them as the machine died almost 10years ago.
Brings back lots of great memories!!!!
- author: Mark Creery (USA)
date: Wednesday 2nd March 2005
text: I owned one of these (or maybe an earlier NEC APC). We ordered it with 8" diskette drives allowing us to port older CPM programs for work in IBM PC's. It also had a nice feature that allowed you to power it on and off on a schedule.
- author: Athelwulf (Australia)
date: Monday 28th February 2005
text: Hi, there, I just received one of these from a kind gentleman. I am having trouble booting it past the initial \[\*\] which is displayed upon power on (an error message of sort?). Am I missing something obvious or is the machine dead. Thanks in advance.
- author: Herb Johnson (USA)
date: Thursday 22nd July 2004
text: In July 2004 I acquired one of these, with color screen. Mine is yellow, and was apparently used with a Bridgeport milling machine, probably for ancient CNC (numeric control). No software, anyone have an 8" boot disk? I believe there are some CP/M GSX drivers around for this beast...
- author: Brian Reid (USA)
date: Wednesday 31st March 2004
text: I once had a pair of these, with software for them piled high.. autocad, infocom works, public domain disks, etc... Eventually the power supply on the single floppy model blew out, and I kept the other alive (it had a failing floppy drive) with the parts from the old one. At the time I was very curious about them and decided one day to put both CPU/memory cards in one machine and it failed to start up. Leafing through the manuals included with it, I found that by flipping a few dipswitches on one board you could alter the memory addresses and give it more than the 640k it came with (though no program could actually access it, both cpus did work and make it slightly faster). I am still a fan of infocom! I do so miss the lights dimming too and the loud hum as it geared up. The internal debugger was also a hoot, pull the rubber plug out of the keyboard and hit the button inside and wa-lah, a debugger right there at your fingertips.
- author: mike lewandowski (work)
date: Wednesday 2nd July 2003
text: Is there any body out there that can repair these boxes. We have one here it work that I program the CNC machine with and i love it. But it won't boot, seems like the drives wob't go.
oc_id: 333
source:
url: https://web.archive.org/web/20230417033459/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=333
date: '2023-04-17'
---
This professional computer from NEC was a very nice system at the time. With its high resolution graphics (640 x 475) and its large disk capacity (1 MB), it sure was impressive in 1982!
**Bill Czermak** recalls:\
I developed the first version of MIPS (Manufacturers Integrated Production System) on one of the first colour APCs sold in Australia. I added a 5 Mb NEC harddisk later. The 8" floppies held 1.2 Mb. I am told my original system is in a museum in the Geelong area.
I added an XT compatibility card to port my software to the the IBM XT and my software worked fine using this card. When I installed it on a customer's genuine IBM, I got a blank screen!!! Which I fixed that day on the customer's premesis. I think the APC was 30% faster than the XT and cheaper with better graphics.
**Jeremiah S. Junken** reports :\
I actually have one of these which still works. By default, it runs CPM/86, there was a UNIX available, and MS-DOS available. Mine had an external 10MB HDD. The software included "benchmark" word processor, VisiCalc and dBase II.
The major things worth nothing about this otherwise unremarkable machine were it's relative speed, the fact that the lights would dim slightly when it was turned on, and that, in the year 2002, it still works. :-)
**Gary McCray** adds:\
I actually still have a working one of these also. Actually, it was pretty remarakable when it came out for its high resolution graphics capability using a (at the time) powerful NEC 7220 Graphics controller chip which formed the base strategy for virtually every other graphics controller since.
Unfortunately very little software was available that took advantage of its graphics capability. Also it was featured in one of the stupidist full page ads ever produced and ran for months with a giant hand covering it up and the admonition "The Computer The Competition Doesnt Want You to See" and a suggestion to write away for information on it (see 'Adverts' section). If that wasn't stupid enough, you couldn't actually get any information on it from either writing or calling.
It is remarkably well made and was extremely powerful and reliable in the time it was built (weighs over 80 lb). But a combination of truly stupid advertising and lack of easy access doomed it in the US to a very small group. It fared much better in Japan understandably, and surprisingly in Australia (no giant hand I guess). I developed graphics authoring programs for it that sold successfully in both Japan and Australia.
<table> <tr> <td></td> <td>We need more info about this computer ! If you designed, used, or have more info about this system, please send us pictures or anything you might find useful.</td> <td></td> </tr> </table>