Spectravideo

~ the obit ~

The company began in 1981 as SpectraVision, founded by Harry Fox, making cartridges and accessories for hardware other people had built. Games for the Atari VCS and the VIC-20, joysticks, and the CompuMate, a membrane keyboard that plugged into an Atari 2600 and turned a games console into something you could type a program on. A naming conflict with a company in an unrelated business forced the change to Spectravideo in late 1982.

Its own machines arrived at Winter CES in Las Vegas in January 1983. The SV-318 was the cheap one, a Z80A at 3.6 MHz with a rubber keyboard and a joystick molded into the front of the case. The SV-328 was the same architecture with a proper keyboard and more memory. Both ran a Microsoft BASIC, and both were built around the video and sound chips that Japanese manufacturers were already standardizing on.

That last detail is why the machine matters. When Microsoft and ASCII Corporation specified MSX later in 1983 as a common standard for eight bit home computers, they worked from the shape of this hardware. The SV-318 and SV-328 are not themselves MSX compatible, they are the draft it was written from, and Spectravideo's own later models fell into line with the finished standard: the SVI-728 in May 1984, the SVI-738 in 1985 with a floppy drive built in, and the SVI-838 in 1986 which handled MSX2 and PC software both.

The money never worked. The company went public in May 1983 with a million shares at $6.25 and the stock was at 75 cents by December of the same year. In March 1984 it agreed to sell sixty percent of itself to Bondwell Holding of Hong Kong, and it kept shipping machines for another four years on somebody else's balance sheet before operations ceased in 1988. Bondwell sold the brand name to a British company that had nothing to do with any of the products, and that company went into administration in 2013 and was formally dissolved on 19 April 2016.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the rise ~

1983 was the worst possible year to arrive with a new eight bit home computer and the best possible year to have designed one. The American market collapsed under too many machines chasing the same buyer, and Commodore's price cuts turned the low end into a place where nobody made money. A company whose stock lost eighty-eight percent of its value inside seven months was not being singled out.

What separated Spectravideo from the rest of that pile is that its engineering was picked up rather than buried. Five million MSX machines sold in Japan alone, and the standard traveled to the Netherlands, to Spain, to Brazil and to Korea, running on hardware from Sony and Panasonic and half a dozen others. Somewhere under all of those is a Las Vegas trade show machine with a joystick stuck in its keyboard.

~ the postmortem ~

The Hong Kong ownership deserves more credit than the ending suggests. Bondwell kept the machines coming for years after the American company had run out of its own capital, which is how the MSX2 models got built at all. By 1986 the SVI-838 was trying to be an MSX2 machine and a PC compatible at once, which reads as a company hedging because it no longer knew which market would still be there.

What reached Turkish homes in those years was not this. The eight bit shelf here was Commodore and Sinclair shaped, and MSX stayed a Japanese and Western European and Brazilian story that I only met later through emulators and other people's nostalgia. So the inheritance is inverted: the box never arrived, but the standard drawn from it is in the DNA of half the eight bit machines anyone anywhere remembers. Spectravideo lost the market and won the specification, and only one of those two things pays a payroll.

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