Welcome to the days when British companies dominated the UK computer industry. Yes, we've gone that far back in time this week, to the days when Acorn, Amstrad, Sinclair and Oric were the cutting edge and the only competition came from America's Atari, Commodore and IBM, who were trying to establish their PC as an industry standard for businesses (fat chance, eh?).

This week saw the first models from Japan's attempt at introducing a standard operating system into the low-end market - MSX. The idea was laudable in that a consortium of hardware manufacturers had agreed to build machines to a specification which would allow software and peripherals designed for one machine to operate on all other models, and the first two MSX computers - Toshiba's HX-10 and Goldstar's FC-200 - hit the shops at the same time.

Sadly, the MSX (the name was derived from the operating system they contained, MicroSoft Xtended BASIC) machines had suffered from the delays inherent in getting a group of companies to agree and then adopt the standard, and the products appeared overpriced (£280 and £230 respectively) for what they offered: a Z80A processor with 32K ROM, 64K RAM and a 16-colour 256x192 graphic display, with tape as the storage medium. As an example, the more powerful Commodore 64, which could also boast an impressive software lineup, would set you back just £199.

The customer could have been forgiven for wondering why he should spend extra dosh to get less with an MSX machine, and furthermore, if all the systems did the same thing, why he should spend an extra £50 to have Toshiba's name on the case as opposed to Goldstar's.

A few software publishers gamely supported the format by converting some of their best sellers to MSX, but there were precious few original games and certainly no 'killer app', which every format needs to really take off. Over the next year a few more MSX machines, such as Sony's Hit Bit (nice name!), filtered into the UK to underwhelm the great British public, and there was much talk of MSX2 and even MSX3 standards being drawn up.