In the eighties many companies tried to compete in the growing home computer market with one or more products. Some companies made history, other had a niche following, some others didn’t succeed or were successful in a few countries only.

The PHC-25 was released in Japan in 1982 and sold worldwide in 1983, but there’s very little information about it, so it probably wasn’t very successful – even Wikipedia just features a one-line description and the bare technical details of the machine. The French site phc25.com has more information about it. Since I got this computer in a lot of items I bought from eBay France in spring 2015, and all the photographs on google have the “ordinateur individuel” sticker, I can deduce that the PHC-25 had a small following in that nation. In the US, the PHC series was presented to the public at the 1983 Winter CES in Las Vegas [1] at the price of $264 [2].

The PHC-25 is the most powerful in a family of three models released by Sanyo, the other two being the PHC-10 and the PHC-20. Based on a Z80A compatible processor, when turned on the computer asks which graphic screen mode to use for the session; the available RAM depends on that choice.

Here are the top and rear views of the computer:

To reduce the size of the computer, the motherboard is split in two layers, connected by a flat cable.

As you can see in the teardown view, the keyboard is quite simple – just the keys and the rubber pads.

Sadly the computer stopped working just before publishing the article, so I couldn’t take a last picture of the machine turned on and connected to a TV. I will ask a friend to lend me a hand to repair it in the next few months.

[1] InfoWorld magazine, 31 january 1983
[2] Collectible Microcomputers by Michael Nadeau, 2002