The product was originally developed by an NEC Japan telecommunications engineering team that was trying to make an inexpensive lightweight terminal for programming
PABX systems. In 1988, as
NEC was trying to create products to update their best selling MultiSpeed, the NEC engineering team in charge of developing personal computers showed the UltraLite to a product management team from NEC Home Electronics USA. Tom Martin, the Vice President in charge of the group, asked, "Can you make this thing run MS-DOS"? When an affirmative response was received, the NEC team knew they had a hit product on their hands. The product was launched shortly before
COMDEX in October 1988 at a gala event in New York City. It was applauded by the media, who were dying to find a small lightweight computing platform that could be used for note-taking and article writing. Unfortunately the publicity surrounding the UltraLite did not reflect itself in consumer demand. This was due to the UltraLite's two
Achilles heels ... the lack of a
hard drive which prevented storage of one's work (for more than a week or so without charging the internal RAM drive) and the use of a relatively slow
8086-compatible processor when the market was moving to the
80286 class. The main downside to the Ultralite (which weighed only 4 pounds) was its price. It sold for between 4 and 5 thousand dollars which was significantly higher than other, albeit heavier, less innovative, computers of the time. Given its use of the RAM drive boot times were actually faster than 80386 class computers. So although the UltraLite ushered in a new era in portable computing, its original design as a telecommunications maintenance terminal proved to be its commercial downfall. Commercial success in that product category was not achieved until
Compaq launched its
LTE brand nearly 12 months later. == Data storage ==