【NEC】 NEC System 100/58, 150/68, 150/78

In April 1984, NEC announced their NEC System 100/58, 150/68 and 150/78, which were the first office computers (*) in Japan to use 32-bit processors. (* Office computers are small business computers used in offices.)

The main features of these machines were:

1) For their central processing unit, they employed 32-bit processors with 24,000 gates (the equivalent of 87,000 transistors) realized using CMOS custom LSI. This custom LSI had a density 3 times that of the 8086, and achieved a processing speed twice that of previous processors from NEC in terms of the arithmetic speed of the processor. Furthermore, the component count of the central processing unit was reduced to one third that of previous models (1/4 in terms of the number of packages), and this improved reliability and enabled greater miniaturization.
2) At the time, there was a growing shift toward office automation (OA), and to handle the diverse range of applications in offices, these systems were designed to enable configuration of composite systems involving connection with OA devices such as OCR, telephone terminals, industrial data terminals, POS and PBX, and had many features to enable integrated systems with personal computers connected with a host computer using a local area network (LAN). More specifically, they had a virtual remote workstation function to enable use of workstations from other systems as workstations within the system, and a remote file access function to enable use of file devices of other systems as file devices within the system.