The MZ-80K was, next to the Apple II, the Commodore PET and the Tandy TRS-80s, one of the best-known computers in the early 1980s. Its name stands for "M" for Micro and Z-80 for the CPU it uses.

It does not have an operating system in ROM and for example BASIC (or CP/M) must be loaded from tape. Sharp called this "clean design" because you could choose what to put in your computer, the MZ-80K came clean... Although a 5.25" floppy disk drive became available later, most people never used anything other than the built-in tape recorder (1200 fps).

There is no color, no high resolution, and character sets cannot be redefined. But the predefined character set was very complete with many different graphic symbols, and people (mainly Japanese) created great games, overcoming the main shortcoming of the MZ-80 series... Later, a graphics card was designed for this computer , allowing the set of characters to be redefined, resulting in a virtual "high resolution" of 320 x 192 pixels.

The MZ-80K is equipped with a real clock and a built-in speaker.

The first MZ-80K were sold in Japan as mounting kits (1978). In 1980, Sharp released the MZ-80K2, basically an MZ-80K with 32 KB of RAM, a non-reflective keyboard, and a volume control on the back of the system. A year later, a cheaper version, the MZ-80K2e, was marketed as an anniversary model when sales of the MZ series reached one hundred thousand machines.