Sord M5

~ the last words ~

Sord was a serious company that had been around since 1970, founded by Takayoshi Shiina when he was twenty-six, and the name is a contraction of software and hardware because that was the pitch. It wrote code for DEC minicomputers first and built machines afterward. By the early eighties it was a reasonably large supplier of business computers with no presence at all in Japanese homes, and the M5 was its attempt to fix that, sold from november 1982 at 49,800 yen against companies that had been in the living room for years.

The hardware was ordinary in the best sense. A Z80A at 3.58 MHz drove a TMS9918 for video, with an SN76489 doing the sound, which is very nearly the specification MSX would publish as a standard a year later and very nearly what Sega had already put in the SG-1000. Software came on cartridge or on cassette, and Sord made a selling point of supporting both, one for convenience and one for price. Namco arcade conversions filled out the early catalog. In Japan it worked immediately: more than 100,000 units in the first year, running at about ten thousand a month, which for a home computer in 1982 was a genuine hit.

Some of that came from a second badge. Takara, the toy company, sold the identical machine as the Game Personal Computer M5 at 59,800 yen with two joypads in the box. Takara had a large electronic-game business already and could see Atari's 2800 heading for Japan, and its read of the market was that the barrier was not the machine but the word. A games console was something a parent said no to. A personal computer was something a parent could be talked into. So Takara put Sord's computer on the toy shelf at ten thousand yen more and let the label do the arguing.

Then 1983 happened to everybody. The MSX standard turned the M5's specification into a commodity that a dozen manufacturers were shipping, and the Famicom took the audience that had been buying it to play Namco games. Sales fell off, and about eighteen months after launch Sord withdrew from the home market entirely. The company itself was fine; Toshiba bought it in 1985, and it is still trading under its own name today after coming back out the other side in 2018.

This one never came near me, and I am reading its Japanese sales figures off an encyclopedia rather than remembering a shop. What travels is the ten thousand yen. Takara priced the same object higher because the higher-priced version was easier to say yes to, which is backwards from how pricing is supposed to work and exactly how buying decisions actually get made. Nothing about that has aged. The classification a product gets written into decides which budget it comes out of and which objections it has to survive, and the people who choose that classification are almost never the people who built the thing.

~ the record ~

~ the word on the lid ~

The two versions are worth putting side by side because so little separates them. Sord's m5 carried a lowercase m alongside the words personal computer, with BASIC-I in the box. Takara's M5 carried a capital M and had the word Game silk-screened across the cartridge cover where Sord had printed the model name, keeping personal computer system underneath it in smaller type. The board underneath was identical.

Takara went on to cut its own version down in july 1983, dropping the joypads to bring the price to 49,800, at which point the two companies were selling the same machine at the same price with different logos. The experiment in what a name is worth had run its course in eight months.

~ England, eventually ~

Britain got a slower and stranger version of the story, documented at the time by the trade press. The M5 was announced for november 1982 and then kept slipping, first to february 1983 and then out of sight altogether, until Shiina flew over in person that april to promise it would be in shops in may. The price he announced was 189.95 pounds, having earlier been promised at 149.95, and by july the original figure was reinstated by knocking forty pounds back off.

By november 1983 the machine was no longer being sold as a Sord at all. Distribution had gone to Computer Games Limited of Loughton in Essex, and the badge on the case read CGL M5. It never rose above fifteenth in the chart of best-selling micros under a thousand pounds, and a year later CGL was clearing stock at under fifty pounds. The Japanese hit and the British also-ran were the same computer arriving nine months apart.

~ 1983 ~

The M5 is one of the clearest cases of a machine killed by a standard rather than by a competitor. MSX did not beat the M5 on specification, because MSX essentially was the M5's specification, published as an agreement and adopted by everyone at once. A machine whose advantage was being a sensible Z80 design with good video and sound has no advantage the moment sensible Z80 designs with good video and sound become the floor.

It also sold reasonably in Czechoslovakia, where it was one of the first affordable computers ordinary people could get hold of, and it went to South Korea. Those markets outlasted its life in Japan, which is a common shape for hardware of the period. The place a machine dies first is usually the place it was designed for.

~ the legacy ~

The M5's real inheritance is not a machine, it is a lesson that the whole industry then relearned every few years. Tomy was running the same play at the same moment with the Pyuuta, sold as a computer to get past the same objection, and Commodore was running a version of it with the Max Machine. All three had worked out that the family's decision-maker was not the person who wanted the thing.

Sord went back to what it was good at and let the home market go. That turned out to be the correct decision, since it is the only one of the three companies still in business under its own name.

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