(Fwd) Re: laptops and 5.25 inch floppy drives?

[Chuck Guzis]

On 9 Jan 2007 at 17:22, Chris M wrote:

>  Was the 9801 sold in this country? It appears not.

Not as such, although it was embedded in plenty of Japanese machine 
tools and lab and medical equipment that wound up in the US.   During 
the late 80's and early 90's, there was a NEC "outreach" effort 
operating out of (IIRC) San Diego, where one could get information 
and equipment.   Not at a good price, however--I was quoted something 
like $350 for a floppy drive.  I don't know when they ceased 
operation.  At one time, the NEC 98xx PCs had more than 70 percent of 
the Japanese market.    You'll sometimes see the term "DOS-V" for the 
NEC flavor of MS-DOS.  Windows was offered in the same NEC-type 
flavor right up to XP.

As far as floppy drives went, one remarkable thing was that the 8", 
5.25" and 3.5" models wrote disks in exactly the same format--
1024x8x2 (1.3MB).  

Cheers,
Chuck