At the same time, AST Research Inc is said to be ready to invade the Japanese market with clones of NEC Corp’s PC-9801 family, from its manufacturing base in Irvine, California: it expects to ship 50,000 units in the first year, but is having problems finding a distributor – as reported, it became the first US manufacturer to announce a PC-9801-compatible in April, but Electronics Business Asia reports that Sharp Corp backed out of a deal to distribute the machines; AST is also considering whether to set up a Japanese manufacturing base and says that it has the support of the US Commerce Department as such moves would open up the market – Commerce attacked encouragement for the Tron operating system in schools, calling it a trade barrier, and appears to regard the NEC domination of the Japanese personal computer market as another trade barrier even though while not IBM-compatible, the machines do run a version of Microsoft Corp’s MS-DOS operating system.
