19 ms·

MSX History: The Platform Microsoft Forgot

147 points by artsandsci 8y ago

zubairq 8y ago
As someone who is personally obsessed about 1960s and onwards computing I found this to be a great a well researched article. I always considered MSX and CP/M to be the real parents of the Windows monopoly. I view MSX as the learning process for Microsoft, and CP/M as the building blocks, since the first version of Windows (called DOS at the time) was API compatible with CP/M
- ido 8y ago
  How is DOS the first version of windows? Just because it was made by the same company? It would be less inaccurate (but still wrong) to say the Mac OS was the first version of windows :/
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - billforsternz 8y ago
    I quite like the idea of DOS being the first version of Windows. In the beginning, there was just a command line. Then Windows was added as a graphical interface. Then the graphical interface became pre-eminent and the command line became an obscure feature to most users. Windows code was originally tied to DOS but over time first completely incorporated it, then recast it as Windows changed from the child to the parent in the relationship.
    - zubairq 8y ago
      Yes, this is what I meant, you said it better than I did. As graphical features were added to DOS then it was rebranded as Windows by Microsoft. I guess at some point Microsoft realised that they had to have two distinct sets of code and that they needed to be different products for branding and legal reasons related to OS/2 and IBM. I guess it could have ended up being called DOS Windows or DOS Gui or something, but Windows was a much better name...
  - zubairq 8y ago
    You are right, as from a design perspective, Windows was based on Mac OS. What I meant was that the first versions of Windows were built on DOS: https://www.quora.com/Is-Windows-still-based-on-DOS https://www.quora.com/Is-Windows-still-based-on-DOS
- jacobush 8y ago
  The MSX computers even had CP/M. At least Spectravideo was distributed both with CP/M and MSX-DOS. The MSX-DOS was weird, I think it must have been the only 8-bit version of DOS Microsoft made? Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS lots of nice anecdotes there.
  - zubairq 8y ago
    Whoa! That's crazy. I did not even know about MSX DOS! Thanks!
FatDrunknStupid 8y ago
Completely derailed my career. Wrote a ZX-Spectrum game and refused to port it to MSX. The pay for the ZX game was a compiler so I doubt much would have come of it anyway.
- xchip 8y ago
  nice! which game did you write? And also why did you refused to port it to the MSX?
  - FatDrunknStupid 8y ago
    It never had a name :( I was 14 and £25 for the compiler seemed like a dream (the ZX-Spectrum was borrowed). I did a demo when the basics worked and they stated that the whole company was now dedicated to the new MSX standard. Given the effort that I'd put in (written in Z80 on squared paper then optimised on squared paper using Z80 manual), most of which went into the graphics engine (the speccy had a fun screen layout), I decided I knew better and bought myself the ideal dev machine - a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX - Built in Z80 dev environment. Graphics and sound chips. Proper keyboard! God I loved that thing. Never finished that game....
- hactually 8y ago
  Heya, you're marked as [dead] on newer posts - might want to hit up the mods
sp8 8y ago
I had a Toshiba MSX (in the UK) as my first computer. My parents bought me that, convinced by the salesman's hype, when everyone else was buying Spectrums and Commodores. At the time it was a pain because not all the good games came out on MSX, but I loved that thing. It taught me BASIC, got me interested in computer-based music (BASIC programmes with endless PLAY statements) and got me into computing rather than just using a computer. I'll always have a soft spot for MSX.
- rixrax 8y ago
  Pretty much same story here. I got Spectravideo SVI-738 with integrated disk drive. Being able to run CP/M on it didn’t really do much when everyone else were having C64s and playing Pirates. :)
- cassianoleal 8y ago
  Same but having grown up in Brazil I had a Gradiente Expert [1]. It was a really nice computer console with 2 cartridge slots which were most of the time occupied by a 5"1/4 floppy drive and sometimes a Data-corder [2][3] (to load software - games - off cassette tapes). It was fun to start loading the tape, then going to play in the garden for 30min-1h as it read the tape, just to come back and see that it had failed and then try again - and play more in the garden. I also learned BASIC, some assembly which was required to add cheats to games before they loaded, and even used to do simple animations from basic geometric shapes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradiente_Expert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradiente_Expert [2] https://youtu.be/SZtkQp1mbQg?t=41 https://youtu.be/SZtkQp1mbQg?t=41 [3] http://files.datassette.org/tech/data_corder_dr1.pdf http://files.datassette.org/tech/data_corder_dr1.pdf
mmjaa 8y ago
I wrote a lot of code for Yamaha MSX systems back in the day. It was truly a delight to be able to see ones programs running on different machines with .. mostly .. ease. For me, the thing that made MSX fail was over-standardisation - it was very difficult for manufacturers to stand out from the pack. Often, the machines all felt the same, so consumers would buy the machines on the basis of style - and there were some truly atrociously ugly MSX machines being designed in those days. (In some ways, its quite similar to the situation with, say, Android today.) And then, there were the places where standardisation hadn't quite worked. Subtle differences between systems often mean that developers had to have a fleet of MSX machines to test on, to be sure. (Again: Android) And in the midst of all of this, along comes IBM and the rest is history .. but for a while, MSX (and MSX2) were really intriguing technologies. Working on MSX in Japan led me to becoming an ITRON adherent, which led to me becoming a systems/OS developer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project .. which put me in the right place, at the right time, to become an early Linux adopter ..
- endemic 8y ago
  Your comment reminded me of some amazing photos of a Sony MSX machine: https://mobile.twitter.com/AttractMode/status/1103852208192409600 https://mobile.twitter.com/AttractMode/status/11038522081924... I wish PC makers today would branch out from their "copy Apple" sterility.
  - bane 8y ago
    Some of Sony's MSX machines are some of the most beautiful computing devices ever made IMHO.
  - puzzle 8y ago
    Sony had probably the most stylish designs among MSX manufacturers. They were not afraid of using curves compared to e.g. Philips' boxier style. There was some other interesting stuff in the 80s, like the systems from Apricot (formerly ACT). There was the Portable http://s11.photobucket.com/user/ballsandy/media/Computer%20related/Apricot/100_2162.jpg.html http://s11.photobucket.com/user/ballsandy/media/Computer%20r... (uncropped at https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2016/10/15/5/1476517900137950723.png https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2016/10/15/5/147651790013... ) which also had voice recognition, or the Xen http://www.1000bit.it/lista/a/act/apricot_xen-i.jpg http://www.1000bit.it/lista/a/act/apricot_xen-i.jpg which had programmable keys and LCD screen on the keyboard.
squarefoot 8y ago
During the mid-late eighties I had a Yamaha CX5 MII MSX computer which I used as a FM synthesizer along with other instruments. I loved it, but although it was vastly superior in just about everything compared to my old C=64, it ended up being used exclusively as a music making machine as I was anyway in the process of migrating from the C=64 to the Amiga. Still the CX5 was a godsend for music: old FM synths were harder to program compared to old school subtractive synths and being able to edit patches on a computer screen rather on a small display made the process a lot easier than on similarly capable synths or expanders.
- kristianp 8y ago
  Did the Msx have midi ports as standard, or am I remembering incorrectly.
  - lokedhs 8y ago
    You might be thinking of the Atari ST, which became popular with musicians for that reason.
    - Annatar 8y ago
      Ah, an ATARI ST! As a kid I had always drooled over a 520 ST and 1040 STFM, but they were too expensive and as a Commodore kid I ended up on the Amiga, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because the Amiga had slightly more powerful hardware and a superior operating system. However the soft spot for the ST always remained and decades later when I can finally afford it, I have a Falcon030 as well. Fascinating machines, the ATARI ST's!
  - Zenst 8y ago
    MIDI was added later to the MSX standard, and came after the CX5M, which added them along with the FM module (which was iirc 5 FM operators - the DX7 synth was 7 FM operators) which was the cheaper flavour of FM.
    - raphlinus 8y ago
S_A_P 8y ago
Another MSX computer from Japan that you could find in a music store? The Roland S samplers from the mid to late 80s to early 90s. The S10, S50, and S330/550 are at their heart MSX standard computers. The basically impossible to find mouse was a standard MSX mouse, and its possible to use a PS2 mouse with an adapter widely available on Ebay. These samplers were 12 bit with a choice of a 15 or 30khz sample rate. Great for digital aliasing noises a'la Sp-1200. They had the additional benefit of a really good digital filter that was available before the Akai S-950. I had and used an S-550 for years, but it really is a pain in the butt to use, even with the mouse or the programmer. Other gear surpassed it in popularity for a pretty good reason, but that sampler was still a pretty amazing piece of gear...
xchip 8y ago
I had one, and out of nostalgia I created a virtual disk drive using an arduino (http://codinglab.blogspot.com/2013/01/virtual-msx-disk-drive.html http://codinglab.blogspot.com/2013/01/virtual-msx-disk-drive...) All my friends had disk drives and I was stuck with the frustrating tape, so creating a virtual disk drive kind of made for it. The games though sucked.
Theodores 8y ago
I think we also forget about how common Microsoft BASIC was. In the late 1970's the hobby market existed with machines then being many and diverse. Almost all of them licensed Microsoft Basic. Only later with the home market and the likes of Commodore, Sinclair et al. did home computers come with their own versions of BASIC. We all know that BASIC is a load of rubbish. But the MicroSoft BASIC on those hobby machines set the mood for what home computers would have, even if it was not MicroSoft's BASIC. Early home computers did have custom ROMs for all kinds of exciting languages, on the BBC Micro you could get BCPL (C, early version), Forth and probably Pascal. Same on the Sinclair machines, there was even a ZX81 clone - the Jupiter Ace - that ran Forth. Despite this plethora of languages we ended up with BASIC. Boring BASIC. There were no resource excuses, Microsoft had just set the tone of what the home computer market was to be. Same problem happened with Windows. Instead of networked UNIX style computers with some security worked out with things like 'user space' there were this ugly DOS and Windows things and it was 'personal computing' with people carrying disks from one PC in the office to another. Although I liked Windows at the time it really was the second time round that Microsoft had stunted computing, first with BASIC and second time with Windows/DOS. Coming from a BBC Micro background where the BASIC was awesome and the disk filing system was okayish I was massively underwhelmed when I first had to use DOS. I felt 'is this all there is' as I experienced the kludginess of it. MSX made precisely zero impact in the UK other than giving the likes of Personal Computer World something to waste dead tree and ink about. From what I remember it was not that hacker friendly as back then you needed to write code that was familiar with the hardware, not abstracted out through some convenient operating system. With a BBC micro you knew that you could write something performant - as in arcade machine grade - with the built in assembler and a lot of work with the A/Y/X registers of the 6502. MSX on a 16 register Z80 with some mystery meat video interface made that possibility unattainable. All considered I think MSX hampered the computer cause, promising something that was never delivered. It was also off in that blind alley of BASIC that MicroSoft foisted on the hobby market a decade earlier.
- 0815test 8y ago
  > We all know that BASIC is a load of rubbish. I don't think this is right - BASIC was quite well designed considering these machines' capabilities and projected use. The model of a BASIC-powered home computer was essentially that of a programmable calculator with "computer" features tacked on. You could start by PRINT-ing math expressions at the REPL, and these would give you the sort of result you would expect, using software floats. Then you could make more complex programs, using simple line numbers, variables, and a handful of reserved words like PRINT/?, INPUT, IF, GOTO, FOR. You also had PEEK, POKE, SYS and/or USR to access the hardware directly. Sure, in theory FORTH might have been more elegant, but its RPN-like approach was far from intuitive.
kgwgk 8y ago
POKE -1,170 Edit: apparently this is done to change the subslot to make sure RAM will be mapped into 0000-7fff. All those words wouldn't have meant much to 12-year-old me, but I certainly knew I had to do that before loading games on my Mitsubishi ML-FX2.
- superempie 8y ago
  Same on a Philips VG-8020. POKE -1,170 was the magic trick back then :)
dewiz 8y ago
I still hold my MSX dear, protected in a box for future generations. That's how I learned to program, fiddle with memory addresses, and weld broken circuits. 3.5MHz could do a lot, well, sort of, games were pretty cool :-)
outworlder 8y ago
The MSX was the sole reason why I am on IT today. Picture a 8 year old boy unwrapping his first computer back in 1988. It would boot up right into MSX Basic (until later on when I added a floppy drive). One could play around with commands and have stuff happen. "screen 2" would take you to a graphics mode, where amazed me would get simple programs drawing stuff on the screen. I didn't know that I was 'programming' anything, only that I would type stuff and run and things would happen. I didn't understand what the 'for' instruction did, among others. My first 'assignment' came from my father. He repaired TVs as a hobby(mostly, he did fix a few for money). One thing he couldn't do was to adjust the alignment on said TVs. There were pattern generator devices which cost quite a lot of money, money we didn't have (even the computer was second-hand). So young me had set out to draw a greed. Easy - screen 2, then a bunch of 'line' instructions, one per grid line. Lots and lots of typing. Since the computer connected to TVs already (through a RF box), all my father needed to do was load the program (from a K7 tape) and hook up to TVs. That was great. Revisiting the program a couple of months later (he wanted the grid spacing changed) and dreading to do that work, I was flipping over the manuals, when it suddently clicked: I could use a variable for the 'line' instructions, and change with this 'for' instruction, which so far had eluded me. A few 'pages' worth of code got translated into 4 lines. I was hooked. Never stopped coding since then. Another thing I tried to do. So PCs came around, with nice graphics (nicer than what I had, and it took a while but then they got nicer graphics than even MSX 2.0 or the Turbo-R). Then Windows 3.1 came around. I tried to replicate Windows 3.1 based on magazine printouts - PCs were still hard to come by, PCs with enough specs to run 3.1 even harder still. At that time, I had switched from Basic to Turbo Pascal (3.0). The MSX port was lacking a few units. Most notably, the * graphics * unit (massive omission if you ask me). So I set out to implement the drawing functions myself. Only I wasn't at the university yet, and didn't know how to draw lines (or god forbid, circles). A quick google search today will give you Bresenham's. Back then, information like that was hard to come by. So I did some thinking. Even though I was booting up to DOS at this time – which meant that all pages were mapped to RAM – MSX Basic was still there in ROM. How did it do it? The functions must be there somewhere. I got hold of the "MSX Red Book". That book described all ROM functions, even undocumented ones, with the memory address, input and output registers. Jackpot! Only problem was, as previously mentioned, all memory banks were switched to RAM. I would have to flip two banks to ROM, run the functions, and then switch back. Then I found a function that did just that, CLPRIM I think it was called. In short order, I had ASM wrappers for most basic drawing functions, and I could draw my "windows". Two problems remained: text, and the "mouse" (I had no mouse, I was faking with cursor keys). Drawing text in graphical mode was far beyond my capabilities – specially since I wanted to squeeze 64 columns (ordinarily that computer would do 40 per line, in text mode, and the character patterns were designed for that). Then I remembered that I had WordStar. WordStar managed to get 64 columns. How? After some digging I found that it would load a program into RAM before running the editor (PC-based DOS users would call these TSR's). So I 'stole' it. Before running my 'windows', I would load it too. Yay windows with titles! (Lots of work done afterward to ensure they would horizontally match and not overflow). Good, now all that's left was the mouse. So I wrote a 'TSR' of my own, which would draw and move a hardware "sprite". The only thing the turbo pascal program would have to listen would be for the space bar, and then retrieve the 'mouse' position from a pre-arranged memory location. The asssembly code took a while to write - it was easy to lock the machine up - no memory protection or multi-processes meant that these were "hard" lock ups, which required a reset. Still, I eventually got it done. Last major problem: both the wordstar TSR and mine required some of the same hooks. hooks were pre-determined memory locations. A 'call' – CD 21 – instruction would be issued to these locations whenever the event happened. Usually, they would contain 'C9' (RET). However, there was just enough space for, lets say, a (JMP) instruction (C3) plus memory address. This way, you could run your own code and then (RET) when done. So we both used the same hooks. The way I got around this was: load the Wordstar one first, then load mine. If I found that there was anything there other than C9, that meant that the hook was in use. So I would save it, put my own in place. When finished, I would transfer control to the code that I had saved before. Finally I had a working system. A few tweaks here and there – I had to save the current state of the graphics processor (VDP) ports whenever my 'mouse' program activated, otherwise it would corrupt the screen. But then it worked flawlessly, if a bit slow (ROM was much slower to access, something I did not know at the time). 12 year old me used this fancy and overengineered system... mostly as a menu to run games, icons and all. Very little 'serious' work was done. It's too bad that there was no version control and almost none of the code survived (I may still have some of the 'TSR' code printed out, an earlier version). It would have made for a nice blog post. I do miss some of that. There were very few abstraction layers between your program and the system, so you really understood what you were doing. The downside is that I now have a few neurons which are forever locked to store now useless MSX trivia. poke &HF346,1 call system
gregrata 8y ago
Cliff notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
- tom_ 8y ago
  Risky click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX_Video_access_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX_Video_access_method (NSFW)
pier25 8y ago
The MSX was also my first computer. I wrote my first lines of code in Basic copying small games from magazines as a 6 year old kid in the 80s. We had a HIT BIT Sony MSX.
- abawany 8y ago
  Same here. Mine had 16k of memory (12k usable).
opinali 8y ago
MSX was a hit in Brazil largely because of our closed market at the time, where importing computers was always very expensive and often illegal. A computer had to be a "national" product, even if that meant just a clone of foreign machines built with mostly imported parts (and very often violating copyright, e.g. I had a ZX Spectrum clone which manufacturer was sued by Sinclair, unsuccessfully, despite copying even the ROM code). In that environment the MSX was a great solution, local companies could join the party of selling a computer/peripherals/SW that benefited from a (hoped) worldwide market, without the costs of licensing or the hurdles of straight piracy.
mavarex 8y ago
I'm from Istanbul, my father bought me when he retired. Just I want a computer for playing game because my friends have c64 and everyday playing game. When I learned there is limited game option my programming journey started. Yes I'm programmer and 43 year old. I don't have any regret. It is my dream to be a programmer. And MSX was my first friend. It is already working. All hail to my MSX friends.
- jacobush 8y ago
  Same for me, same age, same story about programming because there were very few games, unlike for the C64 which my friends had.
  - mavarex 8y ago
    Then my friend enjoy music of knightmare /watch?v=hF0HQYSwcuw
orjan 8y ago
For me here in Sweden, it was a Spectravideo 728. Truly the reason I got into computers. It never was a big platform here so never saw many big games. And a couple of years later I switched to an Amiga. There are quite a few emulators available: - fMSX is multiplatform: https://fms.komkon.org/fMSX/ https://fms.komkon.org/fMSX/ - RuMSX: http://www.lexlechz.at/en/software/RuMSX.html http://www.lexlechz.at/en/software/RuMSX.html It's been a few years since I used any of them so can't vouch for quality.
- pmarin 8y ago
  openmsx is the best one. https://openmsx.org/ https://openmsx.org/
- guaka 8y ago
  I like http://webmsx.org/ http://webmsx.org/ a lot. Works right inside your browser.
snvzz 8y ago
Past the mid eighties, any personal computer platform not using the 68000 family of processor was just doomed. In hindsight, x86 (which was a shittier ISA) survived, but it shouldn't have been.
- IWeldMelons 8y ago
  So did ARM
  - snvzz 8y ago
    Meant to restrict that to CISC ISAs. If we include RISC ISAs, what's surprising is that we're still dealing with CISC today. I'm hoping RISC-V will change that.
boaglio 8y ago
Guys, this is a presentation from Paulo Peccin (WebMSX creator) - in pt_BR but you can turn on subtitles auto-translation . I was there, it was great =) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFL05xsdhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFL05xsdhk - part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISPb1sL72EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISPb1sL72EQ - part 2
mschaef 8y ago
"The most obscure part of Microsoft's history." That's a pretty high bar. Here are a couple other candidates (restricted to stuff that actually shipped as products): * QuickPascal - Microsoft's low end Pascal competitor to Turbo Pascal. (The full MS Pascal might be a reasonable candidate too.) * MS Access, the communications package. (Predates the database of the same name.) * Softcard - Z80 coprocessor board for the Apple ][. (The Mach 10 and Mach 20 PC accelerator oards arn't bad choices either. The Mach 20 was a plug in board for PC's that itself had expansion slots.) * Multiplan - the spreadsheet precursor to Excel. * The runtime-only version of MS Windows. (Bundled with Excel to let people that didn't have Windows run Excel.) * Visual BASIC _for DOS_ - Exactly what it sounds like, but running in text mode DOS.
- mgkimsal 8y ago
  MS Bob?
  - mschaef 8y ago
    I think that omission is mainly my own bias, which stems from my age... I had been paying attention to the industry then and at the time it got a bunch of press. Bob's also interesting in that Melinda Gates was involved in marketing that project, and she considers it her biggest flop: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/the-lesson-melinda-gates-learned-from-screwing-up-a-microsoft-project.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/the-lesson-melinda-gates-lea... MS Xenix is another one that might ought to be on that list. So much of Microsoft's image is built around Windows that the notion of a Microsoft without Windows and selling a 'Unix' has got to be startling to the vast majority of folks.
  - acheron 8y ago
    Bob was and is pretty famous. Obscure in the sense that few people used it (I did!) but it's well-known, probably moreso than anything on that list. Known as a failure, sure, but still well-known.
tluyben2 8y ago
I started on an MSX-1 and then MSX-2 in the early 80s; programming I learned before that in GW-Basic on a luggable [0] and because my parents wanted me to continue (I was just 8), they got an MSX-1 and a year after that an MSX-2. By then I was writing games and wordprocessors (I had some obsession with them at the time) in rancid combinations of MSX-Basic and Z80 asm. It was so fast to iterate that way (provided you were careful with the asm). I wrote enormous monsters of programs in that combi for the MSX-2 and it was always a miracle how they actually worked in the end. Shame I do not have backups. I found a demo of mine on an old MSX-2 BBS backup on a second hand machine I bought, but that was the 'protected' one (Basic source obfuscated and 'hidden' and assembly as bload blob); I have not had the time to figure out what I did there. After that I moved to programming BBS software in Pascal and C and more games and it slowed down the progress a lot; so slow that compiling process. It improved a while later with Delphi but after that (C++, Java, C# etc, Haskell, etc) it all went down again; everything is still not really as accessible and fast to iterate as that Basic and Delphi experience. I think it was mainly because they both were a) very fast (interpreted and with Delphi, a very fast, almost instant compiler) and b) for me, closed loop; I had almost no access to other devs (only via BBS's) and that meant I had "The Book" for my environment and that was all there was to learn. So no code completion or spelonking 1000s of libs was needed, just use what you have and you could make anything. Ofcourse you theoretically could make anything; practically you were slow because you had to basically write a lot yourself that you can just pull from the internet now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems
icedata 8y ago
I worked for Logo Computer Systems in Montreal from 84 to 94, we did quite a bit of development (of Logo versions) for MSX computers. We had many different models, made for the Japanese market mostly. One day we accidentally static-damaged about ten of them (they weren't made apparently for low-humidity environments). We had to have a bunch of the custom chips airlifted in. I spent a week with my boss and a scope trying to get them working. We managed to fix about six of them. I learned a lot about hardware that week. Fun times.

147 points by artsandsci 8y ago

As someone who is personally obsessed about 1960s and onwards computing I found this to be a great a well researched article. I always considered MSX and CP/M to be the real parents of the Windows monopoly. I view MSX as the learning process for Microsoft, and CP/M as the building blocks, since the first version of Windows (called DOS at the time) was API compatible with CP/M

ido 8y ago
How is DOS the first version of windows? Just because it was made by the same company? It would be less inaccurate (but still wrong) to say the Mac OS was the first version of windows :/
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- billforsternz 8y ago
  I quite like the idea of DOS being the first version of Windows. In the beginning, there was just a command line. Then Windows was added as a graphical interface. Then the graphical interface became pre-eminent and the command line became an obscure feature to most users. Windows code was originally tied to DOS but over time first completely incorporated it, then recast it as Windows changed from the child to the parent in the relationship.
  - zubairq 8y ago
    Yes, this is what I meant, you said it better than I did. As graphical features were added to DOS then it was rebranded as Windows by Microsoft. I guess at some point Microsoft realised that they had to have two distinct sets of code and that they needed to be different products for branding and legal reasons related to OS/2 and IBM. I guess it could have ended up being called DOS Windows or DOS Gui or something, but Windows was a much better name...
- zubairq 8y ago
  You are right, as from a design perspective, Windows was based on Mac OS. What I meant was that the first versions of Windows were built on DOS: https://www.quora.com/Is-Windows-still-based-on-DOS https://www.quora.com/Is-Windows-still-based-on-DOS
jacobush 8y ago
The MSX computers even had CP/M. At least Spectravideo was distributed both with CP/M and MSX-DOS. The MSX-DOS was weird, I think it must have been the only 8-bit version of DOS Microsoft made? Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS lots of nice anecdotes there.
- zubairq 8y ago
  Whoa! That's crazy. I did not even know about MSX DOS! Thanks!

FatDrunknStupid 8y ago

Completely derailed my career. Wrote a ZX-Spectrum game and refused to port it to MSX. The pay for the ZX game was a compiler so I doubt much would have come of it anyway.

xchip 8y ago
nice! which game did you write? And also why did you refused to port it to the MSX?
- FatDrunknStupid 8y ago
  It never had a name :( I was 14 and £25 for the compiler seemed like a dream (the ZX-Spectrum was borrowed). I did a demo when the basics worked and they stated that the whole company was now dedicated to the new MSX standard. Given the effort that I'd put in (written in Z80 on squared paper then optimised on squared paper using Z80 manual), most of which went into the graphics engine (the speccy had a fun screen layout), I decided I knew better and bought myself the ideal dev machine - a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memotech_MTX - Built in Z80 dev environment. Graphics and sound chips. Proper keyboard! God I loved that thing. Never finished that game....
hactually 8y ago
Heya, you're marked as [dead] on newer posts - might want to hit up the mods

sp8 8y ago

I had a Toshiba MSX (in the UK) as my first computer. My parents bought me that, convinced by the salesman's hype, when everyone else was buying Spectrums and Commodores. At the time it was a pain because not all the good games came out on MSX, but I loved that thing. It taught me BASIC, got me interested in computer-based music (BASIC programmes with endless PLAY statements) and got me into computing rather than just using a computer. I'll always have a soft spot for MSX.

rixrax 8y ago
Pretty much same story here. I got Spectravideo SVI-738 with integrated disk drive. Being able to run CP/M on it didn’t really do much when everyone else were having C64s and playing Pirates. :)
cassianoleal 8y ago
Same but having grown up in Brazil I had a Gradiente Expert [1]. It was a really nice computer console with 2 cartridge slots which were most of the time occupied by a 5"1/4 floppy drive and sometimes a Data-corder [2][3] (to load software - games - off cassette tapes). It was fun to start loading the tape, then going to play in the garden for 30min-1h as it read the tape, just to come back and see that it had failed and then try again - and play more in the garden. I also learned BASIC, some assembly which was required to add cheats to games before they loaded, and even used to do simple animations from basic geometric shapes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradiente_Expert https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradiente_Expert [2] https://youtu.be/SZtkQp1mbQg?t=41 https://youtu.be/SZtkQp1mbQg?t=41 [3] http://files.datassette.org/tech/data_corder_dr1.pdf http://files.datassette.org/tech/data_corder_dr1.pdf

mmjaa 8y ago

I wrote a lot of code for Yamaha MSX systems back in the day. It was truly a delight to be able to see ones programs running on different machines with .. mostly .. ease. For me, the thing that made MSX fail was over-standardisation - it was very difficult for manufacturers to stand out from the pack. Often, the machines all felt the same, so consumers would buy the machines on the basis of style - and there were some truly atrociously ugly MSX machines being designed in those days. (In some ways, its quite similar to the situation with, say, Android today.) And then, there were the places where standardisation hadn't quite worked. Subtle differences between systems often mean that developers had to have a fleet of MSX machines to test on, to be sure. (Again: Android) And in the midst of all of this, along comes IBM and the rest is history .. but for a while, MSX (and MSX2) were really intriguing technologies. Working on MSX in Japan led me to becoming an ITRON adherent, which led to me becoming a systems/OS developer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project .. which put me in the right place, at the right time, to become an early Linux adopter ..

endemic 8y ago
Your comment reminded me of some amazing photos of a Sony MSX machine: https://mobile.twitter.com/AttractMode/status/1103852208192409600 https://mobile.twitter.com/AttractMode/status/11038522081924... I wish PC makers today would branch out from their "copy Apple" sterility.
- bane 8y ago
  Some of Sony's MSX machines are some of the most beautiful computing devices ever made IMHO.
- puzzle 8y ago
  Sony had probably the most stylish designs among MSX manufacturers. They were not afraid of using curves compared to e.g. Philips' boxier style. There was some other interesting stuff in the 80s, like the systems from Apricot (formerly ACT). There was the Portable http://s11.photobucket.com/user/ballsandy/media/Computer%20related/Apricot/100_2162.jpg.html http://s11.photobucket.com/user/ballsandy/media/Computer%20r... (uncropped at https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2016/10/15/5/1476517900137950723.png https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2016/10/15/5/147651790013... ) which also had voice recognition, or the Xen http://www.1000bit.it/lista/a/act/apricot_xen-i.jpg http://www.1000bit.it/lista/a/act/apricot_xen-i.jpg which had programmable keys and LCD screen on the keyboard.

squarefoot 8y ago

During the mid-late eighties I had a Yamaha CX5 MII MSX computer which I used as a FM synthesizer along with other instruments. I loved it, but although it was vastly superior in just about everything compared to my old C=64, it ended up being used exclusively as a music making machine as I was anyway in the process of migrating from the C=64 to the Amiga. Still the CX5 was a godsend for music: old FM synths were harder to program compared to old school subtractive synths and being able to edit patches on a computer screen rather on a small display made the process a lot easier than on similarly capable synths or expanders.

kristianp 8y ago
Did the Msx have midi ports as standard, or am I remembering incorrectly.
- lokedhs 8y ago
  You might be thinking of the Atari ST, which became popular with musicians for that reason.
  - Annatar 8y ago
    Ah, an ATARI ST! As a kid I had always drooled over a 520 ST and 1040 STFM, but they were too expensive and as a Commodore kid I ended up on the Amiga, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because the Amiga had slightly more powerful hardware and a superior operating system. However the soft spot for the ST always remained and decades later when I can finally afford it, I have a Falcon030 as well. Fascinating machines, the ATARI ST's!
- Zenst 8y ago
  MIDI was added later to the MSX standard, and came after the CX5M, which added them along with the FM module (which was iirc 5 FM operators - the DX7 synth was 7 FM operators) which was the cheaper flavour of FM.
  - raphlinus 8y ago

S_A_P 8y ago

Another MSX computer from Japan that you could find in a music store? The Roland S samplers from the mid to late 80s to early 90s. The S10, S50, and S330/550 are at their heart MSX standard computers. The basically impossible to find mouse was a standard MSX mouse, and its possible to use a PS2 mouse with an adapter widely available on Ebay. These samplers were 12 bit with a choice of a 15 or 30khz sample rate. Great for digital aliasing noises a'la Sp-1200. They had the additional benefit of a really good digital filter that was available before the Akai S-950. I had and used an S-550 for years, but it really is a pain in the butt to use, even with the mouse or the programmer. Other gear surpassed it in popularity for a pretty good reason, but that sampler was still a pretty amazing piece of gear...

xchip 8y ago

I had one, and out of nostalgia I created a virtual disk drive using an arduino (http://codinglab.blogspot.com/2013/01/virtual-msx-disk-drive.html http://codinglab.blogspot.com/2013/01/virtual-msx-disk-drive...) All my friends had disk drives and I was stuck with the frustrating tape, so creating a virtual disk drive kind of made for it. The games though sucked.

Theodores 8y ago

I think we also forget about how common Microsoft BASIC was. In the late 1970's the hobby market existed with machines then being many and diverse. Almost all of them licensed Microsoft Basic. Only later with the home market and the likes of Commodore, Sinclair et al. did home computers come with their own versions of BASIC. We all know that BASIC is a load of rubbish. But the MicroSoft BASIC on those hobby machines set the mood for what home computers would have, even if it was not MicroSoft's BASIC. Early home computers did have custom ROMs for all kinds of exciting languages, on the BBC Micro you could get BCPL (C, early version), Forth and probably Pascal. Same on the Sinclair machines, there was even a ZX81 clone - the Jupiter Ace - that ran Forth. Despite this plethora of languages we ended up with BASIC. Boring BASIC. There were no resource excuses, Microsoft had just set the tone of what the home computer market was to be. Same problem happened with Windows. Instead of networked UNIX style computers with some security worked out with things like 'user space' there were this ugly DOS and Windows things and it was 'personal computing' with people carrying disks from one PC in the office to another. Although I liked Windows at the time it really was the second time round that Microsoft had stunted computing, first with BASIC and second time with Windows/DOS. Coming from a BBC Micro background where the BASIC was awesome and the disk filing system was okayish I was massively underwhelmed when I first had to use DOS. I felt 'is this all there is' as I experienced the kludginess of it. MSX made precisely zero impact in the UK other than giving the likes of Personal Computer World something to waste dead tree and ink about. From what I remember it was not that hacker friendly as back then you needed to write code that was familiar with the hardware, not abstracted out through some convenient operating system. With a BBC micro you knew that you could write something performant - as in arcade machine grade - with the built in assembler and a lot of work with the A/Y/X registers of the 6502. MSX on a 16 register Z80 with some mystery meat video interface made that possibility unattainable. All considered I think MSX hampered the computer cause, promising something that was never delivered. It was also off in that blind alley of BASIC that MicroSoft foisted on the hobby market a decade earlier.

0815test 8y ago
> We all know that BASIC is a load of rubbish. I don't think this is right - BASIC was quite well designed considering these machines' capabilities and projected use. The model of a BASIC-powered home computer was essentially that of a programmable calculator with "computer" features tacked on. You could start by PRINT-ing math expressions at the REPL, and these would give you the sort of result you would expect, using software floats. Then you could make more complex programs, using simple line numbers, variables, and a handful of reserved words like PRINT/?, INPUT, IF, GOTO, FOR. You also had PEEK, POKE, SYS and/or USR to access the hardware directly. Sure, in theory FORTH might have been more elegant, but its RPN-like approach was far from intuitive.

kgwgk 8y ago

POKE -1,170 Edit: apparently this is done to change the subslot to make sure RAM will be mapped into 0000-7fff. All those words wouldn't have meant much to 12-year-old me, but I certainly knew I had to do that before loading games on my Mitsubishi ML-FX2.

superempie 8y ago
Same on a Philips VG-8020. POKE -1,170 was the magic trick back then :)

dewiz 8y ago

I still hold my MSX dear, protected in a box for future generations. That's how I learned to program, fiddle with memory addresses, and weld broken circuits. 3.5MHz could do a lot, well, sort of, games were pretty cool :-)

outworlder 8y ago

The MSX was the sole reason why I am on IT today. Picture a 8 year old boy unwrapping his first computer back in 1988. It would boot up right into MSX Basic (until later on when I added a floppy drive). One could play around with commands and have stuff happen. "screen 2" would take you to a graphics mode, where amazed me would get simple programs drawing stuff on the screen. I didn't know that I was 'programming' anything, only that I would type stuff and run and things would happen. I didn't understand what the 'for' instruction did, among others. My first 'assignment' came from my father. He repaired TVs as a hobby(mostly, he did fix a few for money). One thing he couldn't do was to adjust the alignment on said TVs. There were pattern generator devices which cost quite a lot of money, money we didn't have (even the computer was second-hand). So young me had set out to draw a greed. Easy - screen 2, then a bunch of 'line' instructions, one per grid line. Lots and lots of typing. Since the computer connected to TVs already (through a RF box), all my father needed to do was load the program (from a K7 tape) and hook up to TVs. That was great. Revisiting the program a couple of months later (he wanted the grid spacing changed) and dreading to do that work, I was flipping over the manuals, when it suddently clicked: I could use a variable for the 'line' instructions, and change with this 'for' instruction, which so far had eluded me. A few 'pages' worth of code got translated into 4 lines. I was hooked. Never stopped coding since then. Another thing I tried to do. So PCs came around, with nice graphics (nicer than what I had, and it took a while but then they got nicer graphics than even MSX 2.0 or the Turbo-R). Then Windows 3.1 came around. I tried to replicate Windows 3.1 based on magazine printouts - PCs were still hard to come by, PCs with enough specs to run 3.1 even harder still. At that time, I had switched from Basic to Turbo Pascal (3.0). The MSX port was lacking a few units. Most notably, the * graphics * unit (massive omission if you ask me). So I set out to implement the drawing functions myself. Only I wasn't at the university yet, and didn't know how to draw lines (or god forbid, circles). A quick google search today will give you Bresenham's. Back then, information like that was hard to come by. So I did some thinking. Even though I was booting up to DOS at this time – which meant that all pages were mapped to RAM – MSX Basic was still there in ROM. How did it do it? The functions must be there somewhere. I got hold of the "MSX Red Book". That book described all ROM functions, even undocumented ones, with the memory address, input and output registers. Jackpot! Only problem was, as previously mentioned, all memory banks were switched to RAM. I would have to flip two banks to ROM, run the functions, and then switch back. Then I found a function that did just that, CLPRIM I think it was called. In short order, I had ASM wrappers for most basic drawing functions, and I could draw my "windows". Two problems remained: text, and the "mouse" (I had no mouse, I was faking with cursor keys). Drawing text in graphical mode was far beyond my capabilities – specially since I wanted to squeeze 64 columns (ordinarily that computer would do 40 per line, in text mode, and the character patterns were designed for that). Then I remembered that I had WordStar. WordStar managed to get 64 columns. How? After some digging I found that it would load a program into RAM before running the editor (PC-based DOS users would call these TSR's). So I 'stole' it. Before running my 'windows', I would load it too. Yay windows with titles! (Lots of work done afterward to ensure they would horizontally match and not overflow). Good, now all that's left was the mouse. So I wrote a 'TSR' of my own, which would draw and move a hardware "sprite". The only thing the turbo pascal program would have to listen would be for the space bar, and then retrieve the 'mouse' position from a pre-arranged memory location. The asssembly code took a while to write - it was easy to lock the machine up - no memory protection or multi-processes meant that these were "hard" lock ups, which required a reset. Still, I eventually got it done. Last major problem: both the wordstar TSR and mine required some of the same hooks. hooks were pre-determined memory locations. A 'call' – CD 21 – instruction would be issued to these locations whenever the event happened. Usually, they would contain 'C9' (RET). However, there was just enough space for, lets say, a (JMP) instruction (C3) plus memory address. This way, you could run your own code and then (RET) when done. So we both used the same hooks. The way I got around this was: load the Wordstar one first, then load mine. If I found that there was anything there other than C9, that meant that the hook was in use. So I would save it, put my own in place. When finished, I would transfer control to the code that I had saved before. Finally I had a working system. A few tweaks here and there – I had to save the current state of the graphics processor (VDP) ports whenever my 'mouse' program activated, otherwise it would corrupt the screen. But then it worked flawlessly, if a bit slow (ROM was much slower to access, something I did not know at the time). 12 year old me used this fancy and overengineered system... mostly as a menu to run games, icons and all. Very little 'serious' work was done. It's too bad that there was no version control and almost none of the code survived (I may still have some of the 'TSR' code printed out, an earlier version). It would have made for a nice blog post. I do miss some of that. There were very few abstraction layers between your program and the system, so you really understood what you were doing. The downside is that I now have a few neurons which are forever locked to store now useless MSX trivia. poke &HF346,1 call system

gregrata 8y ago

Cliff notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

tom_ 8y ago
Risky click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX_Video_access_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX_Video_access_method (NSFW)

pier25 8y ago

The MSX was also my first computer. I wrote my first lines of code in Basic copying small games from magazines as a 6 year old kid in the 80s. We had a HIT BIT Sony MSX.

abawany 8y ago
Same here. Mine had 16k of memory (12k usable).

opinali 8y ago

MSX was a hit in Brazil largely because of our closed market at the time, where importing computers was always very expensive and often illegal. A computer had to be a "national" product, even if that meant just a clone of foreign machines built with mostly imported parts (and very often violating copyright, e.g. I had a ZX Spectrum clone which manufacturer was sued by Sinclair, unsuccessfully, despite copying even the ROM code). In that environment the MSX was a great solution, local companies could join the party of selling a computer/peripherals/SW that benefited from a (hoped) worldwide market, without the costs of licensing or the hurdles of straight piracy.

mavarex 8y ago

I'm from Istanbul, my father bought me when he retired. Just I want a computer for playing game because my friends have c64 and everyday playing game. When I learned there is limited game option my programming journey started. Yes I'm programmer and 43 year old. I don't have any regret. It is my dream to be a programmer. And MSX was my first friend. It is already working. All hail to my MSX friends.

jacobush 8y ago
Same for me, same age, same story about programming because there were very few games, unlike for the C64 which my friends had.
- mavarex 8y ago
  Then my friend enjoy music of knightmare /watch?v=hF0HQYSwcuw

orjan 8y ago

For me here in Sweden, it was a Spectravideo 728. Truly the reason I got into computers. It never was a big platform here so never saw many big games. And a couple of years later I switched to an Amiga. There are quite a few emulators available: - fMSX is multiplatform: https://fms.komkon.org/fMSX/ https://fms.komkon.org/fMSX/ - RuMSX: http://www.lexlechz.at/en/software/RuMSX.html http://www.lexlechz.at/en/software/RuMSX.html It's been a few years since I used any of them so can't vouch for quality.

pmarin 8y ago
openmsx is the best one. https://openmsx.org/ https://openmsx.org/
guaka 8y ago
I like http://webmsx.org/ http://webmsx.org/ a lot. Works right inside your browser.

snvzz 8y ago

Past the mid eighties, any personal computer platform not using the 68000 family of processor was just doomed. In hindsight, x86 (which was a shittier ISA) survived, but it shouldn't have been.

IWeldMelons 8y ago
So did ARM
- snvzz 8y ago
  Meant to restrict that to CISC ISAs. If we include RISC ISAs, what's surprising is that we're still dealing with CISC today. I'm hoping RISC-V will change that.

boaglio 8y ago

Guys, this is a presentation from Paulo Peccin (WebMSX creator) - in pt_BR but you can turn on subtitles auto-translation . I was there, it was great =) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFL05xsdhk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFL05xsdhk - part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISPb1sL72EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISPb1sL72EQ - part 2

mschaef 8y ago

"The most obscure part of Microsoft's history." That's a pretty high bar. Here are a couple other candidates (restricted to stuff that actually shipped as products): * QuickPascal - Microsoft's low end Pascal competitor to Turbo Pascal. (The full MS Pascal might be a reasonable candidate too.) * MS Access, the communications package. (Predates the database of the same name.) * Softcard - Z80 coprocessor board for the Apple ][. (The Mach 10 and Mach 20 PC accelerator oards arn't bad choices either. The Mach 20 was a plug in board for PC's that itself had expansion slots.) * Multiplan - the spreadsheet precursor to Excel. * The runtime-only version of MS Windows. (Bundled with Excel to let people that didn't have Windows run Excel.) * Visual BASIC _for DOS_ - Exactly what it sounds like, but running in text mode DOS.

mgkimsal 8y ago
MS Bob?
- mschaef 8y ago
  I think that omission is mainly my own bias, which stems from my age... I had been paying attention to the industry then and at the time it got a bunch of press. Bob's also interesting in that Melinda Gates was involved in marketing that project, and she considers it her biggest flop: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/the-lesson-melinda-gates-learned-from-screwing-up-a-microsoft-project.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/the-lesson-melinda-gates-lea... MS Xenix is another one that might ought to be on that list. So much of Microsoft's image is built around Windows that the notion of a Microsoft without Windows and selling a 'Unix' has got to be startling to the vast majority of folks.
- acheron 8y ago
  Bob was and is pretty famous. Obscure in the sense that few people used it (I did!) but it's well-known, probably moreso than anything on that list. Known as a failure, sure, but still well-known.

tluyben2 8y ago

I started on an MSX-1 and then MSX-2 in the early 80s; programming I learned before that in GW-Basic on a luggable [0] and because my parents wanted me to continue (I was just 8), they got an MSX-1 and a year after that an MSX-2. By then I was writing games and wordprocessors (I had some obsession with them at the time) in rancid combinations of MSX-Basic and Z80 asm. It was so fast to iterate that way (provided you were careful with the asm). I wrote enormous monsters of programs in that combi for the MSX-2 and it was always a miracle how they actually worked in the end. Shame I do not have backups. I found a demo of mine on an old MSX-2 BBS backup on a second hand machine I bought, but that was the 'protected' one (Basic source obfuscated and 'hidden' and assembly as bload blob); I have not had the time to figure out what I did there. After that I moved to programming BBS software in Pascal and C and more games and it slowed down the progress a lot; so slow that compiling process. It improved a while later with Delphi but after that (C++, Java, C# etc, Haskell, etc) it all went down again; everything is still not really as accessible and fast to iterate as that Basic and Delphi experience. I think it was mainly because they both were a) very fast (interpreted and with Delphi, a very fast, almost instant compiler) and b) for me, closed loop; I had almost no access to other devs (only via BBS's) and that meant I had "The Book" for my environment and that was all there was to learn. So no code completion or spelonking 1000s of libs was needed, just use what you have and you could make anything. Ofcourse you theoretically could make anything; practically you were slow because you had to basically write a lot yourself that you can just pull from the internet now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems

icedata 8y ago

I worked for Logo Computer Systems in Montreal from 84 to 94, we did quite a bit of development (of Logo versions) for MSX computers. We had many different models, made for the Japanese market mostly. One day we accidentally static-damaged about ten of them (they weren't made apparently for low-humidity environments). We had to have a bunch of the custom chips airlifted in. I spent a week with my boss and a scope trying to get them working. We managed to fix about six of them. I learned a lot about hardware that week. Fun times.