1984 · Light-Pen School Home Computer · Work 989 of 1,871
A classroom of a village school in Burgundy on a spring morning, on old wooden desks arranged in a half circle six flat black home computers, each before a small colour television, thick black cables running to a larger beige computer on the teacher's desk, in front one machine sharp, its grey rubber keys, one yellow key and one black key plain, smooth and unmarked, a dark hinged flap at its upper left, a child's hand from the lower edge resting on the keys, a slim silver and black light pen lying beside it, the screen filled with soft areas of colour, chestnut trees in blossom through tall windows.
What it was used for
French home computer, on sale from June 1984 at 2,390 francs, where the older TO7 had cost about 7,000. Motorola 6809E at 1 MHz, 48 KB RAM of which 16 KB was screen memory, 16 KB ROM with monitor program and MO5 BASIC 1.0. It entered schools through the state plan "Informatique pour tous", presented by Prime Minister Laurent Fabius on 25 January 1985: about 120,000 additional microcomputers and some 110,000 teachers to be trained. By September 1985 roughly 120,000 machines stood in schools. In the type II school configuration, 6 MO5 workstations hung off one computer at the head of the Nanoréseau network.
What was new
The MO5 had a dedicated connector for a light pen, allowing the user to point directly at the screen without a mouse. The pen was sold as an accessory — an offer published in Science & Vie Micro in December 1984 listed it at 200 francs — while in many school installations it came with every workstation. The barb lies not in the machine but in the plan: by the time the programme began, the MO5 had been on sale for months and was not designed for the plan, and the Aconit museum records that these machines, unlike the PC and the Macintosh, kept no lasting place in the market.
What the sources leave open: The plan's figures (120,000 machines, 110,000 teachers, as of September 1985) come from histoireinformatique.info; the Aconit museum gives only the target of 120,000 machines and dates the plan's start to 1984. How many of them were MO5s is stated by no source checked. No lifetime sales figure for the MO5 could be substantiated.