MSX: The Japanese are coming! The Japanese are coming!

MSX Computing and What MSX? did not publish in alternate months. What MSX? was bi-monthly but MSX Computing was a monthly. I only know because I worked on the damn thing.

Girl in the Sony ad

Seiko Matsuda, really popular Japanese celebrity in the 80s. Haven't seen her face since about 1988, thanks for the face from the past.

Too late to the party?

The mid-late eighties (85-87) was wild. Old clunky eight bit hardware won't do any longer. The BBC Micro became in 1981, and just four short years later the Amiga made its debut, along with the Atari ST. We'd transitioned from an eight bit world to a 16/32 bit world. Perhaps more importantly we'd transitioned from hardware with limited addressing capabilities (in the order of 64K direct) to hardware with much more generous amounts of memory on board. The Acorn Archimedes, the first true 32 bit machine, arrived in '87. So wanting to promote the bigger better MSX take-two for Christmas '87 seems a bit... um... well, look at the competition. Sure, these bigger better machines weren't cheap (and as an owner of an Archimedes, I know they were amazingly expensive) but what they were in comparison to the cheap kit was not something that could be answered by looking at hardware specs. I got a lot out of my Beeb. I briefly owned a Speccy which I used to play games, and in the end I gave it to a friend who used it to play games until he got an Amiga. My Beeb was used for coding, and lots of fun with Econet. As for the Archimedes, I'm still with RISC OS today, albeit on something very different and raspberry-flavoured.

tl;dr: Just look at the dates mentioned here and then do some research. The MSX was going to come and blow away the dross of the scattered home computer market. Only, by the time it arrived, the home computer market (still scattered!) blew them away. We'd moved on. And how. T'was a good idea though, software compatibility, and and idea that would be revisited in style with the birth of the PC market, which was also starting to make waves in the same time frame.

Pretty good article

But you missed out the MSX 2+.

In my opinion, the reason it all went wrong in the UK was that programmers here never figured out you could put multiple sprites on top of each other in order to make a multicoloured sprite. They must have taken one look at the specs and assumed it was just another Spectrum. A load of sloppy Speccie conversions followed, in some cases even with the stripey loading screen lines. And those of us who were used to Konami's quality as a bench mark couldn't believe what a load of crap the British software was.

Anyway, happy days. I still remember the glow of the LEDs on my VG-8235. The feel of the keyboard on my NMS-8280. Proper, decent, stylish computers with decent cursor keys. Sniff.

alt-Speculation

I'm currently toying with some PDP-11 code, and these article have set me wondering - what could have happened if the LSI-11 (PDP-11 as a single-chip CPU) had arrived a couple of years earlier and the Altair 8080 had used it instead, and CP/M had been written for the Altair 11, and 1970s hobbyist computers of the time had been PDP-11 based, and progressing to the early 1980s with a ZX-11, Spectrum-11, Amstrad CPC-11, etc. Would today's coders be crippled with the x86 model of programming instead of a neat orthogonal flat Rn register set?

NEC 9801

With so much attention to Japanese companies, why no mention of NEC and its 9801 models. From the early 80s, this series completely dominated the Japanese PC market, and probably accounts for Japan's later weakness in the global computer business. I guess I'm missing something. But I know who Matsuda Seiko is.

Hated them

I worked on the Argus MSX magazine, which I remember as MSX User, but Argus titles tended to be called "computing" as in A&B Computing, Computing Today, Games Computing etc.

I always thought MSX computers were underwhelming with rubbish sprites and the games poor.

This article would have been...

...so much more 'palatable' had it been on one page rather than six.

Just sayin'.

Still, rather good, it was.

I almost

finished an entire track with a Yamaha CX5 connected to a couple of synths and a drum machine.

Epic sequencing power by 80s standards. You could add and remove notes anywhere in the track.

What you couldn't do was play from anywhere in the track.

So you had to listen from the start to hear an edit at the end.

Every. Time.

Will we be talking about Xbox in a similar fashion in 20 years time?

The flawed system that quickly disappeared without a trace.

A Race

How could the Japanese mega-corps fail so spectacularly ? The home computer market was a race to get stuff on the shelves, and this seems to have favoured smaller, faster-moving companies. But that doesn't really explain how the American mega-corps succeeded, eg Texas Instruments.

Spectravideo 328

We had the SV328 - that was a nice machine, and I knew it was somehow related to MSX but never knew the details until now and it explains why there was no software of note (in New Zealand at least).

My mate had a C64 and after a few rounds of Summer Games at this place I would go back and feverishly type out my own version, being sure to remove all the spaces in the MS Basic source so it would fit in the 60KB (80KB less about 18 for ROM).

30 years later I'm still doing the same thing, just with more horsepower, bigger sprites and I get to keep the spaces. Go figure.

My first computer ever was the Canon MSX which I bought along with my friend when we were visiting London. He had money, I did not. He bought Pascal and Assembler too. I wrote an assembly code, hand converted to opcode and fed to the memory using debug command. With this code, I made my copy of Pascal and Assembler tape. Piracy, I give you that. But still, my first useful code.

IBM compatible micros ..

“I realised that our IBM Basic would be the standard for business and that lots of manufacturers would make micros that were IBM compatible”

No one including IBM predicted the PC clone market ..

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“We will never make a 32-bit operating system”, Bill Gates