MSX

~ the last words ~

In some Arab classrooms in the late 1980s, and in Cuban ones too, computing was taught on a room full of networked Yamaha machines wired together at the front bench. Those were MSX computers. So were the Sakhr machines Yamaha built in Japan for a Kuwaiti company and sold across Egypt and the Gulf. So was the Hotbit that Sharp's Brazilian division made a hit out of, and the Talent that Argentina assembled off a Daewoo design.

MSX was not a computer. It was a specification, announced by ASCII Corporation on 16 June 1983 with the first machines shipping that October. Microsoft conceived it as a product for the Japanese market and Kazuhiko Nishi, an ASCII director who was also running Microsoft's Japan operation, took it to the manufacturers. The pitch was explicitly VHS: agree on one architecture so a cartridge bought for a Sony works in a Philips.

The list of companies that signed is the impressive part. Sony and Panasonic and Philips and Canon and Yamaha and Toshiba and Sanyo and Daewoo and Samsung and Goldstar and Casio and Mitsubishi all built MSX machines, which is more consensus than the home computer industry has ever managed before or since. Nine million of them sold in Japan. In South Korea and across South America it was the dominant home computer of the decade, and it did well in the Netherlands and Spain.

It never took in the United States, where the C64 was already entrenched and cheaper, and Commodore reworked its own product line specifically to blunt the MSX feature list before it became clear that MSX was not coming. Without America, the standard was a large regional success rather than the world standard it was designed to be.

I have no memory of any of this. The last MSX machine rolled off a line in 1993, when I was nine and five years away from my first modem, and the countries where MSX actually landed do not include mine. This is not distance in the nostalgic sense. It is a straightforward absence: the machine that shaped a generation of programmers in Sao Paulo and Seoul was simply never in the room.

~ the record ~

~ where it actually landed ~

The MSX map is the most interesting thing about it, because it is almost an exact photographic negative of the map every other 8-bit platform occupies. The C64 and the Spectrum owned Britain and America. MSX owned east Asia and most of South America, and then turned up in places that bought computers by ministry contract rather than at a department store.

That second category is why classrooms in the Soviet Union and Cuba ran MSX at all. A standard with many licensees meant a government could put out a tender and get bids, which is a boring advantage that mattered enormously outside the consumer markets. One Sony MSX2 even went up to the Mir space station.

~ what it became ~

The partnership behind it did not survive its own success. Microsoft broke with ASCII in early 1986, claiming Nishi owed the company more than half a million dollars, and set up its own Japanese subsidiary instead. The New York Times later reported that one of the final straws was Nishi spending a million dollars on a giant mechanical dinosaur built in Tokyo as an advertising stunt. The break between the two men was bitter and stayed that way for a long time.

The hardware ended slowly. MSX2 in 1985 and MSX2+ in 1988 kept it alive in Japan, and an MSX3 was planned for 1990 around a new Yamaha video chip that showed up two years late, by which point the market had gone. What shipped in its place was the TurboR, with a 16-bit ASCII processor and most of the MSX3 ambitions switched off. Only Panasonic was still manufacturing by then. The 1991 model cost 99,800 yen and sold badly. Production stopped in 1993.

What outlived the hardware is the software written for it. Konami's MSX catalog is a large part of how it made its name in the 1980s, and the first two Metal Gear games were MSX2 titles before anyone outside Japan had heard of the series. The emulator scene has kept the whole library running for thirty years, which for a dead standard from 1983 is a better retirement than most.

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