Today is a very special day for the entire MSX community. The MSX standard is celebrating its 25th anniversary. Yes, it´s already 25 years ago that
Kazuhiko Nishi of
ASCII Corporation and
Bill Gates of
Microsoft, including several other major companies attempted to revolutionize the computer-world. The MSX standard was formally announced during a press-conference on June 27th, 1983. Many people have enjoyed and are still enjoying the MSX computer. Over 5 million MSX computers were sold in a decade in which computers at home were still for a small audience. The MSX died a commercial death in 1992.
However, the MSX Community could not leave this computer system alone. Using the machine was and is still relatively easy. Learning to code in several languages like BASIC, PASCAL and C is easy as well. Even Assembly language for the Z-80 based MSX computer is perfectly understandable for a lot of people within the MSX community. The open documentation on the MSX computer system and it's relatively simple hardware design allowed many computer hobbyists to understand how this machine worked. This way, many people learned how to create new hard- and software for it.
In the past 5 years, the MSX community showed its remarkable strength time and again. Where in 2003 MRC the release of an MSX demo or, let alone, game or hardware device was big news, now a much more steady flow of often much more impressive new MSX releases is being brought to us by the many people that still devote quite a bit of their spare time on our beloved MSX computer system. The
MSXdev competition, for instance, has become an instute and - albeit in Japan only - even a new MSX computer, the
One Chip MSX saw the light of day. To just get a tiny impression of how much actually happened in the MSX world during the past 5 years, we refer to our new year's posts of
2008,
2007,
2006,
2005,
2004 and
2003. Well worth having a look at for some good old nostalgia!
Throughout the day we expect to be celebrating the 25th anniversary of MSX in style with several entries in the
MRC MEGA Challenge that comes to an end today.
Happy anniversary and on to the next one!
The MSX Resource Center crew
