Sony Built a Computer in 1982, and Almost Nobody Remembers It
Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]
The SMC-70 was Sony's first computer, released in 1982. A Hacker News discussion traces why Japanese machines like it and MSX failed in the US: by the time they arrived, Commodore and the IBM PC already dominated, and the machines offered little that was unique. Racism and protectionism played a role, but the offerings simply weren't distinctive enough to compete.
They became a huge place to manufacture PCs for a long time, but it was almost always under someone else's name.
- rbanffy
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.
- dddw
Love this guys vids, superinteresting.
- peter_d_sherman
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!