Short answers, pulled from the story.
Capcom president Kenzo Tsujimoto conceived the CP System in 1986 with the goal of making arcade games twice as good as home consoles. This vision emerged as a direct countermeasure to the rising tide of home video game consoles threatening the arcade experience.
The CP System featured a Motorola 68000 CPU running at 10 MHz paired with a Zilog Z80 co-processor. It could display 4,096 colors on screen from a palette of 65,536 and handle the simultaneous display of 256 sprites per scanline.
The system launched its golden era with the release of Dynasty Wars in April 1989 followed by the genre-defining Final Fight on the 1st of December 1989. By 1991 the CP System had become the primary vehicle for Street Fighter II: The World Warrior released on the 6th of February 1991.
Capcom implemented the suicide battery to combat rampant bootlegging of the system's architecture which made it easy for pirates to clone game software. If the battery voltage dropped below 2 volts the registers were wiped rendering the game inoperable and forcing arcade operators to send the board back for expensive repairs.
Production of the CP System hardware officially ceased on the 11th of May 1995 marking the end of an era for Capcom's arcade division. Technical support for the CP System and its games was finally withdrawn on the 31st of March 2015 bringing a definitive close to the platform's support cycle.