Commodore Pet 2001 (Japanese edition)

I'd personally love to see a Korean Sinclair Spectrum (they were made by Samsung).

Quite a few western machines were sold in Japan, most with bugger all success apart from the Apple Macintosh. I'd love to see a Japanese manual to the Sinclair ZX80 and ZX81.

 

There was a Korean and Japanese Speccy?? I wonder if they had any fantastic games? It is interesting to see how Samsung would have built the system in the early days.

Yakumo

 

Look closer...

http://www.museo8bits.com/anuncios/cplus4.jpg

;-)

As for Sinclair, Mitsui were the official Japanese distributor, although I believe they just imported stock UK machines. They distributed the ZX81, certainly, but I don't know if they distributed any Spectrums in Japan. Perhaps by then the likes of the MSX and Sharp home micros (amongst others) were too popular in Japan for a British company to compete.

I can't find anything on Samsung making official machines, though. The only people licensed to make Spectrums that I know of were Timex in the US and Investronica in Spain. There were, apparently, knock-offs of the ZX81 in Hong Kong, such as those made by Lambda Electronics:

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=1168

Samsung did make their own Z80-based computer, the SPC-1000, but it has nothing to do with Sinclair's machines, other than having the same CPU. It ran CP/M, which the earlier Sinclair machines did not.

http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=803
http://flickr.com/photos/urbandisturbance/2956235736/
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/SPC-1000