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Pretty sweet and interesting 8-bit machine. I'd love to find one near me, but they are nearly unobtanium.
I really love the keycaps.
I have one of these from an interactive exhibit. The exhibit predated my time at the company. I think it was a common form factor based around the s-100 bus.
If you can, please 3D scan everything. The original units are incredibly rare and need to be properly documented.
I also have the documentation and cut sheets. How incredible rare. I’m getting ready to shed all the mass produced computers I have. Didn’t realize this was as gem. I admit I never saw another one.
Where are you located?
The expansion design was surprisingly advanced for 1982. Why didn’t Sony become a major PC manufacturer after this?
I saw another video a few months ago that talked about Japan’s attempt to enter the US market. I think it might have been Asianometry.
I think it talked more about MSX. By the time it came to the states it was already competing with other better established things like Commodore. And then once the IBM PC became the big thing they really didn’t have anything special to offer. It was just another set of machines that, well built well, weren’t really any different.
Racism and protectionism probably played into it some, given the time period. But mostly their offerings weren’t as unique here. So many computers weren’t practical in Asia since they didn’t support any of the local character sets so at home they weren’t competing that much with those.
So in the end none of the brands really succeeded. They became a huge place to manufacture PCs for a long time, but it was almost always under someone else’s name.
Building a microcomputer was pretty easy. Getting everyone to write software for it was very hard. Everyone tried to build an incompatible rent seeking fiefdom. Most of them failed. Then the relentless price competition of the clones finished them all off.
At a guess I'd say that the spec wasn't quite competitive enough at the price it was pitched.
Consider that the C64 was also launched in 1982 for a much cheaper price and was available in non-NTSC regions too, so would have had a bigger software library available to it.
Many people can put up with less convenience with peripherals if you're paying an order of magnitude less up front.
Even the software on cassette and 5.25" disk would have been so much cheaper to distribute than the newly launched 3.5" disks (which were much better).
The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.
They had too expensive machines that just didn't do enough to justify the extra cost. They also liked to do weird proprietary stuff, like a lot of their sub-notebooks from the late 90s/2000s are pretty awesome but they'll have stuff like the CD-ROM/Floppy drive will only connect to like 3 models using some unique connector you'll never find.
There was an HN post recently about the USA and Microsoft intervening to prevent Japan from getting too far ahead in PCs, combined with some of Japan's own mistakes.
I often joked, back then, that MSX was a brilliant effort to persuade Japanese computer manufacturers to invest in a family of nearly identical 8-bit systems so that they could compete in price rather than features.
The video explains in detail why this machine did not make Sony a major PC manufacturer.
Love this guys vids, superinteresting.
This has to be one of the most clever old/vintage computer things I've seen for awhile...
Basically, instead of a rigid hardware bus (fixed metal traces on a PCB motherboard), it uses a soft, flexible multi-pin cable with multiple connectors -- as its bus!
Brilliant!
Yes, these would be frequency-limited because they couldn't be designed with the same precision as the buses on the circuit boards today, but for older computers running in the lower Mhz regime, this would not have been a problem.
And yes, you could argue that the S-100 bus had cable versions of it, and SCSI was a bus extension, and both of these would be valid arguments, but I've never thought of using a soft multi-pin cable as an actual low-Mhz early computer bus -- until watching this video.
Anyway, great video!
Here's an in-depth write-up of the hardware, software, manuals, variants, release prices and other info:
https://zzxio.com/about-us/sony-smc-70/