1983 · MSX Standard Home Computer · Work 986 of 1,871
The dining room of an apartment in Tokyo on a late-autumn morning, on a table a flat wedge-shaped home computer of glossy red plastic, a black band with a module slot, rows of grey keys, a beige space bar and one red key, at its right a large grey cross-shaped direction pad, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, a cable to a television on a sideboard, its screen a soft grid of pale blue and yellow squares, a woman's hand reaching in from the right edge of the frame, the rest of her outside the frame, on the direction pad, a closed household account book, lace curtains in low sunlight.
What it was used for
Sony home computer, on sale from November 1983 at 54,800 yen (IPSJ Computer Museum). Z80A-equivalent processor, 16 KB of main RAM and 16 KB of video RAM, 32 KB ROM holding MSX-BASIC, 256 × 192 pixels, 16 colours, 32 sprites. An ordinary television served as the display; programs came as cartridges or from cassette. The museum names beginners without specialist knowledge as the target users and lists the bundled menu-driven software for household tasks: scheduling, address book, memos.
What was new
What was new lay not in the machine but in the standard behind it. MSX was devised in 1983 by ASCII and Microsoft Japan as a common architecture for 8-bit home computers, so that MSX software ran on machines from different makers (IPSJ Computer Museum). 14 companies released MSX machines, among them consumer-electronics firms such as Sony and Matsushita. The barb: the shared standard did not hold the makers together. 9 companies made MSX2 products and only 3 — Sanyo, Sony and Matsushita — sold MSX2+ machines, primarily because of the fast growth of 16-bit computers in the home market. The last MSX model appeared in 1991.
What the sources leave open: The IPSJ Computer Museum gives November 1983 and 54,800 yen for the HB-55 but no unit figures. Whether the HB-55 was the first MSX machine on sale is not stated by any source checked, so no such priority is claimed here.