This was the industry's first 16-bit business computer, announced by Mitsubishi Electric in 1981. It could be used for a wide-range of applications, including office processing/calculation, scientific and engineering calculation, and use as a host terminal.
The 8088 (4.4MHz) was used as the CPU. Memory was 64Kbit DRAM, and the machine could accommodate anywhere from a minimum of 128 kilobytes to a maximum of 384 kilobytes. The 8087 high-speed arithmetic processor could also be installed. The CRT display employed industry leading high-resolution graphics, enabling designation of 8 different colors for each of 640x400 dots. The standard model allowed use of 500 kanji (Chinese characters), and could handle 4,000 characters with a 128 kilobyte memory expansion. Kanji display was 16 dot x 16 dot, and up to 40 characters x 20 lines could be displayed on the CRT. In terms of file units, the system was equipped standard with 5.25-inch double-sided double-density flexible disk drive (300KB). Other file units could also be connected, including: an 8-inch double-sided double-density flexible disk drive (1 megabyte) and a 5.25-inch hard disk (10 megabytes).
The OS was CP/M-86 from Digital Research Corporation (U.S.), and it provided a logical address space up to 1 megabyte in size. All software, except for the standalone M-BASIC ran under CP/M. Language support was provided for BASIC, COBOL and FORTRAN. The machine also supported "Multiplan" (a high-performance general-purpose spreadsheet analysis language), "Multiplot" (a drawing package) and 100 different task-specific application packages. It was also designed with the capabilities needed to function as a distributed processing terminal for a host computer.
