I looked at myself in the mirror this morning and as far as I can see my skin isn't yellow and my eyes don't slant. That's reassuring when you're psyching yourself up to write a pro-MSX letter to PCN.
To judge from recent letters, you're preaching to the converted with your anti-MSX stance. Sir Clive of the Black Watch has an obvious axe to grind, I suppose, but Anthony Cleall on last week's page misses the point by such a long way that he ends up almost arguing against himself.
You don't have to be a Spectrum owner to know that it's out of the question to buy a new computer every time a better one is produced. It's possible that Spectrum owners actually have an advantage in this respect - the chances are that they paid so little for their machines that they can consider buying another more easily than those of us who forked out £200 or more. But that's beside the point. Producing newer and better machines isn't the way to beat the Japanese.
Acorn has the right idea with the BBC B; here's a machine that can serve as the engine-room of a system that can be expanded in any number of ways. Sir Clive can't do that with the Spectrum because the Spectrum isn't suitable for anything that needs more than two or three key strokes. But the BBC B is expensive. What we need is a half-way house - a system that can be expanded without costing you an arm and a leg in the process.
Isn't that what MSX will offer? I don't know whether they've got disk drives sorted out yet, and I don't know what the impact of MSX Mark 2 will be, but it seems to me that a group of big companies that set out to promote a standard can be relied on to maintain compatibility as the standard and the systems develop.
The prospect of a Spectrum with extra ROM and perhaps a music synthesiser is enough to make a cat laugh. It wouldn't be a Spectrum any more, so why not call it a day and put it out to grass somewhere while you go ahead with a system that will let you expand in those kinds of ways.
It needn't be MSX, strictly speaking. An Electron, an Amstrad, maybe even an Oric will give you the same scope eventually. But you're still out on a limb with them. With an MSX machine, you'll have first call on all the little extras that people put out for all the systems in the group.
At the moment that could mean any one of a dozen micros. Isn't anything else a dead-end street by comparison?
19th January 1985
