MS-DOS was not the only standard that Microsoft attempted to impose on the computer industry in the early 80s. Japanese business and computer geek maverick Kazuhiko Nishi had effectively willed Microsoft’s Japanese arm into existence after befriending Bill Gates at the 1978 National Computer Conference. His vision, driven by the burgeoning common business platform of the IBM PC and MS-DOS, was to do the same for the home market and create a standard platform for that audience.
When Spectravideo contacted Microsoft for a BASIC for their new home computer, Nishi saw an opportunity: he proposed that their machine should be the basis for this new standard. The platform was primarily based around simple, off-the-shelf parts for key components such as CPU, sound and graphics chips and I/O interfaces. Architecturally, it was very similar to existing computers and consoles such as the Colecovision and Sega SG-1000 (predecessor of the Master System). Thus, most vendors were in a position where building an MSX compliant machine would be relatively easy for them.
The MSX was formally announced at a press conference in June 1983. There were big names involved. Canon, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Sanyo, Toshiba, Yamaha, Sony, to name just a few, all announced they would support the new would-be standard. Cleverly, they also chose to avoid the intensely competitive US market which was in the throes of a Commodore-led price war. While the MSX was virtually unknown in America, in Japan, South Korea, Argentina and Brazil it became the pre-eminent common home computer system of the 1980s. It was also popular in Europe, particularly in the Netherlands and Spain. Here in the UK, however, the big names like Sinclair, Acorn and Commodore were far too entrenched to be threatened.
MSX2 followed in 1985, and did well on home turf and in its European enclaves, but was never released in the UK. It substantially upgraded the graphics hardware and evolved the MSX standard from a deliberately modest common platform into a genuinely capable games machine. Our Sony has been upgraded to MSX2, and titles like the original Metal Gear show what the extended hardware can do. MSX2+ and MSX turboR followed in 1988 and 1990, but were never officially launched outside Japan. The boundaries between "home" computers and "work" computers were beginning to blur as IBM-compatibles started to find their way into the home, and by this stage the dream of a worldwide home-computer standard had effectively ended.