MSX & The Earl's Court Computer Show

I used to go to the Earls Court Computer show every year.

I think it is quite sad that we lost the variety in the computer world. Compatibility is all very well but half the excitement was seeing how far programmers could push a certain machine to beat the others. Those who say that the market was unsustainable should look at today's games console market where games are still written for several different platforms successfully.

It is worth noting though that deep down, the console platforms aren't that hugely different either. While the hardware is all over the place, the actual rendering is based on either OpenGL or DirectX. Hardware abstraction lets them get away with a lot of flexibility.

LMAO at that Commodore numb-nut trying to big up the +4 and Commodore 16

Horrible horrible business descision. The plus 4 was susposed to be a low priced computer to compete at the timex sinclairs level.

Commodore outsold sinclair by millions so i don't know what the interveiwer is talking about british taking the lead in computers. Maybe I heard it wrong. The msx computers were pieces of junk its funny how history turns out.

MSX was very popular elsewhere in the world. Many of today's game franchises all started on MSX such as Metal Gear. As far as Clive Sinclair, he was known to...blatantly lie to puff up his own company and status. It's disappointing that there are so few ITV Database and BBC Micro videos available to view online these days.

Since the video references Dragon going bust (1984) and the CBM 64 still cost £399 at the time compared to £150 for Spectrum, I doubt they were ahead at the time the programme was made.

They had destroyed Ti by this time and the spectrum was never considered more than a toy in the united states.

Insightful vision from Bill Gates, but of course, Sinclair was right. This was the days before high-level hardware abstraction, so trying to keep software compatibility by keeping hardware the same can't have seemed like a good idea (and it turned out it wasn't) what with Moore's law and whatnot.