Thomson MO5

~ the last words ~

Thomson put the MO5 on sale in France in june 1984 at 2,390 francs. It ran a Motorola 6809E at 1 MHz with 32K of user memory and a separate 16K for video, and it put 320 by 200 in eight colors on a television. Programs loaded from cassette. The related TO7/70 launched alongside it as the more expensive model. Neither was remarkable next to what Britain already had, and neither was meant to be, because the buyer Thomson cared about was not standing in a shop.

Seven months later the French state made the MO5 the computer an entire generation of French children would meet first. That decision was industrial policy wearing an education costume. Thomson was nationalized and losing money, and putting a state order underneath it solved two problems that had nothing to do with each other. Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, who had pushed the idea of a national computing plan hardest, had wanted Apple machines. He did not get them.

The machines went into classrooms wired together on the Nanoreseau, a small RS422 network of up to 32 stations at 500 kbit/s, hanging off a server with the floppy drives and the printer. On paper this was ahead of what most countries were doing with school computing in 1985. In practice a tenth of teachers ever used one in a lesson, because nobody had solved the part where a teacher who has never seen a computer is handed one and a class of thirty.

Turkey never had a version of this in the eighties. There was no national plan and no French-style bet that the country's own manufacturer would supply the country's own schools, and whatever hardware reached here reached individuals through commerce rather than through policy. The Turkish version of the idea arrived a generation later and involved tablets, and the shape of the result was familiar enough to anyone who had read about 1985. The hardware gets delivered. The training does not.

~ the record ~

~ the plan ~

Informatique pour Tous was presented by prime minister Laurent Fabius on 25 january 1985 with a budget of 1.8 billion francs, of which 1.5 billion was for equipment. The stated targets were over 120,000 machines into 50,000 schools, with 110,000 teachers to be trained. It started that same school year, which is fast for a program of that size and is part of why it went the way it did.

France had form here. The Plan Calcul of 1966 was the same instinct applied to mainframes: the state deciding that a domestic computer industry was a matter of sovereignty and buying one into existence. Minitel came out of the same thinking and actually worked, for twenty years. Informatique pour Tous is what the approach looks like when the technology underneath it is moving faster than a procurement cycle.

~ the fall ~

The MO5 shipped a 6809 at 1 MHz in 1984 and Thomson was still shipping a 6809 at 1 MHz in 1989. That was deliberate, a decision to avoid breaking compatibility across the range, and it meant that by the end the machines were being outrun on price and power by everything around them. A school that bought in 1985 was holding obsolete equipment by 1987 and had no upgrade path that did not mean throwing out the software as well.

The MO6 replaced the MO5 in 1986, an improved machine into a market that had stopped believing. The estimates for what French institutions later spent modernizing away from all this run into billions of euros, which is the part of a state hardware program nobody puts in the press conference.

~ the day it died ~

Thomson announced its complete withdrawal from microcomputing in 1989 and Informatique pour Tous was abandoned in the same stretch. The machines mostly ended up in cupboards. French people of a certain age still describe the MO5 as the R5 of computing, which is affectionate and also exactly right: a small national product that was everywhere at once at home and was never going to win anything outside its own borders.

The plan is still argued about in France, and the honest verdict is somewhere in the middle. It failed on its own terms, because the machines were wrong and the teachers were not ready. It also put a computer in front of a whole cohort of French children years before that was normal anywhere, and a fair number of people who now work in French software met their first keyboard on a state-issued MO5.

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