Tomy Tutor

~ the last words ~

Tomy was a toy company and the Pyuta was its computer. Matsushita built it and it went on sale in Japan in 1982, reaching Britain and the United States the following year as the Grandstand Tutor and the Tomy Tutor. Inside was a Texas Instruments TMS9995, a 16-bit processor from the same family as the one in the TI-99/4A, with the TMS9918 video chip beside it and sixteen kilobytes of memory. The keyboard was chiclet rubber, fifty-six keys, JIS layout. The whole thing weighed 1.7 kilograms.

The specification was the good part. Almost everything selling against it at the same price in 1982 was 8-bit, and Tomy had quietly put a 16-bit machine on the shelf next to them. What Tomy did with that advantage was announce a children's computer. The company set a target of ninety thousand units and five billion yen in the first Japanese year by selling the Pyuta to elementary and junior high students as a machine for drawing, and it stated in public that the manual would let an eight-year-old get the thing working without adult supervision.

It started well enough. Nearly forty thousand units shipped in the first four months. Then Nintendo released the Family Computer in 1983, which did the one thing a Japanese child actually wanted a box under the television to do, and did it for less money. Sales fell hard. Abroad the Tutor ran into the ZX Spectrum in Britain and the Commodore 64 more or less everywhere else and came off the shelves quickly. A revision called the Pyuta mk2 arrived in 1983 with a proper mechanical keyboard, sold only in Japan, and it did not last long there either. By may 1984 total shipments across all markets stood at 120,000. In february 1985 Tomy stopped production and left the computer business.

The eight-year-old claim is the part worth keeping. It was a strange thing to advertise in 1982 and it turned out to be the only forward-looking statement in the entire campaign, except that it came true about phones rather than about computers. Where I grew up the machines children learned on were never designed for children at all. They were general purpose boxes bought for an office or a family, and the kid in the house became the expert because the kid was the only one willing to read the manual. Tomy built a computer that assumed the child would be handed the documentation. Everywhere else, the child had to go and find it.

~ the record ~

~ the marketing was the bug ~

The criticism that has followed this machine for forty years is not about its hardware. It is that the Tutor was presented as a children's toy when what Tomy had actually built was a cheap and slightly evolved TI-99/4A. Anyone shopping for a home computer in 1982 on the strength of processor width would have wanted it, and nobody shopping that way was in the aisle where Tomy had put it.

This is a failure that is difficult to reverse once made. A price can be cut and a keyboard can be replaced, and Tomy did both, but the category a product is announced into is fixed on the first day by the people who write about it. The mk2 with the real keyboard was a serious machine sold to an audience that had already been told it was for eight-year-olds.

~ the console version ~

In april 1983 Tomy shipped the Pyuta Jr., which was the same architecture with the keyboard taken off and a game console in its place, sold only in Japan. It is a fairly clear admission of where the sales were actually coming from. The software library backs this up. Alongside the drawing and education material sat licensed Konami arcade conversions of Frogger and Scramble and Pooyan and Loco-Motion, with Mr. Do! from Universal beside them. Roughly half the catalog was Japan-exclusive.

~ the legacy ~

Not much, in the direct sense. No successor, no standard, no software that outlived the hardware. What it does leave is a clean case study, which is why people still write about it: a product whose engineering was ahead of its price bracket and whose positioning was so far off that the engineering never got looked at.

The machines themselves survive in reasonable numbers, mostly in Japan, and there is an emulator for it that runs on a Commodore 64, which is a joke with a fairly small audience and a very good punchline. Tomy went on being Tomy and absorbed Takara in 2006. It has never made another home computer.

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