MSX History: The Platform Microsoft Forgot
I think we also forget about how common Microsoft BASIC was.<p>In the late 1970&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;s BASIC.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Same problem happened with Windows. Instead of networked UNIX style computers with some security worked out with things like &#x27;user space&#x27; there were this ugly DOS and Windows things and it was &#x27;personal computing&#x27; 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&#x2F;DOS.<p>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 &#x27;is this all there is&#x27; as I experienced the kludginess of it.<p>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&#x2F;Y&#x2F;X registers of the 6502. MSX on a 16 register Z80 with some mystery meat video interface made that possibility unattainable.<p>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.