That brings back memories. After releasing the SMC-70, Sony released a model called the SMC-777. In Japan, commercials featuring Seiko Matsuda were frequently broadcast, and it sold reasonably well. However, because it struggled to grow in the consumer PC market, I recall that they entered the MSX market.
Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
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Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#22I love this thing so much. It has such great cyberpunk vibes with those chunky expansion modules. I can imagine a pixel-art video game where you update your in-game computer's capabilities by acquiring and plugging in these blocks into your ever-expanding system bus. It's so freakin' cool
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#23The expansion design was surprisingly advanced for 1982. Why didn’t Sony become a major PC manufacturer after this?
> Why didn’t Sony become a major PC manufacturer after this?
I remember reading about it in magazines when it launched but at ~$1500 for the base model at launch (without monitor) and still ~$1000 18 months later, for consumers it just couldn't compete with the $600-$800 Commodore 64 and Atari 800. In 1983 >$1,000 was a non-starter for amatuer hobby users, plus there weren't many game titles for it.
While CP/M was popular with the early IMSAI / SOL / S-100 homebrew hackers, it was never very relevant for most mass consumer hobbyists. CP/M was really disk-centric and in the early 80s floppy drives weren't within reach for the '2nd Wave' broader consumer hobby market. We got our first computers (C64, Atari 800, TI 99/4a, Radio Shack Coco) envisioning cartridge & cassette usage plugged into a TV we already had through an RF modulator. If you could afford it, the component RGB output of the Sony would certainly have looked incredible but in the early 80s most consumers were still a few years away from even seeing their first RGB monitor in person. No local store had ever even had one on display, so we didn't really know what to make of it. To us, Composite Video was the esoteric "better looking" output vs RF to your old TV. :-)
The SMC-70's price and capabilities were a better fit for business users but by '83, MS-DOS and "PC-Compatible" were clearly 'the future' for business users and CP/M was on the way out.
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> so would have had a bigger software library available to it. The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.
The video covers how CP/Ms big problem was that the disk formats weren't the same between machines, doubly true for this Sony which used new 3.5" disks. So all the existing CP/M software had to be specifically re-released for this machine, which caused a chicken and egg problem (who is going to release software for a machine nobody is buying because there is no software for it)
The MS-DOS world solved the problem by everyone just cloning the IBM hardware down to the disk format.
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#25Here'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/
This is really cool, thanks for sharing.
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> so would have had a bigger software library available to it. The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.
Kind of, because while MS-DOS was compatible between PCs, CP/M depended pretty much on what 8 bit machine you had, and like UNIX required compilation from source for proper compatibility.
FTL Modula-2 for example, had several low level portability modules depending on which CP/M machine you were actually using.
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so would have had a bigger software library available to it. The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.
Some would argue MS-DOS was the CP/M of its time. >smile<
At least it had the FCB, some interrupts and COM executable format from CP/M. :)
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> so would have had a bigger software library available to it. The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.
That's true but all the cool SMC-70 features, like the graphics modes, were custom to it.
CP/M programs written for other machines couldn't really make use of any of that unless they were rewritten specifically for the SMC-70.
If you just wanted the CP/M text compatibility and not the extended features you could buy a machine capable of that for much, much less.
As Kalleboo points out, if you wanted to buy off the shelf CP/M software you'd probably have to buy an external 5 1/4" disk drive too.
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so would have had a bigger software library available to it. The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.
The video covers how CP/Ms big problem was that the disk formats weren't the same between machines, doubly true for this Sony which used new 3.5" disks. So all the existing CP/M software had to be specifically re-released for this machine, which caused a chicken and egg problem (who is going to release software for a machine nobody is buying because there is no software for it) The MS-DOS world solved the problem by…
This is, indeed, an issue. IIRC, the only interchangeable disk format with CP/M was with 8 inch media.
Unless the disks had copy protection, you could copy them over a serial link. I did that a lot between my Apple II and other CP/M machines.
Re: Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
> so would have had a bigger software library available to it. The SMC-70 could run CP/M software. CP/M was the MS-DOS of its time.
That's true but all the cool SMC-70 features, like the graphics modes, were custom to it. CP/M programs written for other machines couldn't really make use of any of that unless they were rewritten specifically for the SMC-70. If you just wanted the CP/M text compatibility and not the extended features you could buy a machine capable of that for much, much less. As Kalleboo points out, if you wanted to buy off the sh…
Digital Research had GSX, which provided a rich set of graphics primitives. Sony would need to offer a device driver or, alternatively, make the console/terminal emulate a graphics terminal such as the DEC VT-240 (and GSX would use a Tek4014 or ReGIS backend).
A lot of CP/M machines had graphics-capable built-in displays. Unfortunately, publishing software in machine-native media was a real chore back then, a bit like in the 1990's, where we had a "Unix version of NetScape" which was actually 27 slightly different versions for 27 different operating systems and binary architectures.