The BASIC Master MB-6880

Manufactured in	1978
Manufactured by	Hitachi, Ltd.
Owner	The National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo
Location of historical materials	The National Museum of Nature and Science, Tokyo 4-1-1Amakubo, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki 305-0005, Japan
Visitor information	Not open to the public (visit by appointment only)
Contact	Department of Science & Engineering webmaster@kahaku.go.jp　http://www.kahaku.go.jp/

The BASIC Master MB-6880, a major product among early personal computers, was announced in September 1978. An 8-bit microcomputer HD46800 was adopted as CPU, and monitor and BASIC were installed on two mask ROMs of 4 kilobytes. It was equipped with 4 kilobytes of RAM, which could be extended to a maximum of 32 kilobytes. It incorporated a video interface for composite video signals or Japan standard TV signals, and could display 32 characters×24 lines (768 characters).

Naturally, it could be programmed in BASIC, but it was also designed to play tunes programmed with tones given by Japanese katakana characters, and to execute game programs with the built-in standard graphic mode. It could be connected to a commercial cassette recorder, and recorded programs could be called by file names.

At that time, the term of the "personal computer" was not familiar to the general public. As a result, Hitachi sold it as the "Hitachi microcomputer BASIC Master". The following year when Hitachi started to sell an updated model, they named the older one the "BASIC Master Level 1".