The MSX standard was originally developed in Japan, with the cooperation of Microsoft in the US-its OS was a port of MS-DOS to 8-bit Z80 systems, Tim Paterson t

The MSX standard was originally developed in Japan, with the cooperation of Microsoft in the US-its OS was a port of MS-DOS to 8-bit Z80 systems, Tim Paterson the original developer of MS-DOS did the port-he’d left Microsoft by this point to found his own company, so he did it at his new company under contract to Microsoft. MSX systems were also quite popular in Europe-Phillips was also a major manufacturer of them. Like other 8-bit machines, you could get an add-on board or cartridge to add Kanji support. First generation MSX machines, some higher-end models had Kanji built-in, lower-end models you needed to buy the expansion. Later generations of Japanese MSX machines, Kanji support was standard even on the entry models. Machines were also differentiated by how many Kanji they supported (JIS1 provided the ~3000 most commonly used Kanji, JIS2 added another ~1000 which were less commonly used). There were other Japanese machines which found a foothold in some overseas markets. IBM Japan developed a modified version of the PCjr, the PC JX, for the Japanese market. IBM ended up also selling the JX to schools in Australia and New Zealand (minus the Kanji circuitry), and many bought them (I remember using one at school when I was 9 or 10.) Similarly, Fujitsu’s cloned IBM mainframes, the FACOM machines, were popular with Australian businesses and governments in the 1980s and first half of the 1990s. They were also sold in other markets, but in other markets were generally rebadged (or even manufactured under license) by vendors such as Amdahl in the US and Siemens in Europe, whereas in Australia they were sold directly by Fujitsu and generally closer to what was sold in Japan.