The Story of a PC-9821Cx2 Bought by a High School Student on Loan

I still remember well the first computer I bought for myself.

The NEC PC-9821Cx2. It was a machine I got when I was in high school by taking out a loan and paying it off with my part-time job wages. The price at the time was around 400,000 yen. By today's standards, that is an incredibly reckless amount for a high school student to pay on their own. Even so, I wanted it.

What kind of machine was the PC-9821Cx2?

The PC-9821Cx2 S17T was a desktop model in the PC-98 series released by NEC around 1995. It had a 75MHz Pentium CPU, 8MB of memory, and an 850MB HDD. It also had a built-in modem and fax. Compared to today's computers, every spec is orders of magnitude lower.

However, at the time, this was "state-of-the-art." It came with Windows 3.1 as standard, but it was an era where the influence of MS-DOS was still strong, and there were many situations where you couldn't do anything if you didn't know how to type commands. It had a built-in CD-ROM drive and a TV tuner. It even came with a large 17-inch monitor and stereo speakers. It was an all-in-one machine from an era that touted multimedia support. The fact that you could read CDs on a computer and even watch TV made it a special time.

What did I use it for?

I had several uses for it.

I played games a lot. The PC-98 was very well-stocked as a game platform at the time, and it had a collection of titles called masterpieces. It is no exaggeration to say that I chose this machine for games.

I also started studying programming. I touched on C and COBOL, writing and running simple programs. I feel that the experience of typing in code and seeing the screen change is what led to my current job.

I also connected to the Internet. During the Tele-hodai time slot, at 11:00 PM, I would dial up using the phone line. I can still remember that unique sense of tension the moment the modem made its screeching sound and connected. The built-in modem was 14.4kbps. Compared to today's fiber-optic lines, that is several thousand times slower.

I also started design and production on this machine. I drew pictures with graphic tools, and after graduating from high school, I produced animations using Flash. This machine taught me the feeling of "creating something on a computer."

What it meant for a high school student to pay 400,000 yen

Thinking about it now, I'm surprised my parents agreed to be the guarantors for the loan. My part-time job at the time paid in the 600 yen per hour range. While paying it off steadily every month, I used it carefully so as not to break it. For a while, the computer was the most expensive thing in my room.

Even after I finished paying for the main unit, the expenses didn't end there. During high school, I also upgraded the memory. 8MB of additional memory cost around 60,000 yen. It's a price that is hard to believe by today's standards, but that was the world of memory at the time. It required a significant amount of resolve to scrape that together from a part-time job paying in the 600 yen per hour range.

After graduating from high school, I also dabbled in CPU "geta" (clogs). A "geta" is a socket conversion adapter that allows you to install a new CPU that isn't natively supported into an old socket. It was an accelerator sold by third parties like Melco, and I replaced it with an AMD K6-2 350MHz. That's a calculation of more than four times the clock speed from the original 75MHz Pentium. The price was around 20,000 yen, an era where it had become more affordable compared to the 60,000 yen for memory upgrades. Opening the case myself and swapping parts—the process itself was fun. The tension of wondering what would happen if it broke, and the sense of accomplishment when it booted up. I still remember that feeling.

Perhaps because I faced it with such desperation, I was serious about how I used it. I could sit in front of the screen for hours. Games, programming, the Internet—everything was fresh. The groundless conviction that "you can do anything with a computer" has been inside me since those days. It was a machine I used until it wore out before I became a working adult.

Comparing it with today's PCs

When I think about it alongside the Windows desktop I use now, it feels like a different age. Processing speed, memory, storage, screen resolution—everything is incomparable. The weight, power consumption, boot time, everything has changed.

But I feel that the essence of the act of sitting in front of a computer and doing something hasn't changed. Writing and running code, creating something and displaying it on the screen—that joy is the same now as it was in the era of the PC-9821Cx2.

The high school student who took out a loan and faced that machine is still somewhere inside me.