What made you want MSX instead of C64?

The Reason?

Machines with Software eXchangeability

Oh but the C64 had that too, even more so than MSX since there were an awful lot more of them

I didn't know the MSX had a higher profit margin...

When my parents decided to buy me a computer, I basically had the choice between an MSX2 or an Amiga. IIRC they were in the same price range back then, 1988, and the plain ansd simple reason I chose the MSX2 was twofold:

1 - I did know a couple of people who had an MSX, but no one who had an Amiga
2 - MSX2 was easier to program

My father did bring a C-64 into the house, a couple of years before I finally got my own MSX, but I remember the loooooooooooong tape loading (my MSX2 had an FDD!), having to type weird codes (PRINT "<heart symbol>" to do CLS ) and POKE and SYS around to get a bit of graphics on screen (hurray for MSX BASIC!) and even more POKEs and stuff just to do PLAY "ABC". Nah, C-64 never was an option, really, although playing Squish-em, Fort Apocalypse and Manic Miner (hi dvik ) was real fun.

And we did have an ZX-81, too (Or actually, a Timex 1000), bought in Germany for only DM99 (about 50 euro). That was fun: 1 K of RAM, part of which was allocated for video (dynamically!). A friend sold (or gave) us his old 16K memory upgrade; in which we had to replace some transistor every now and then for th ething to work. In the end some of the memory chips grew bad, which made a couple of address ranges unusable. Makes for very interesting programming

EDIT: <off-topic>
ML programming on a 1K ZX-81:
- write your ML program, on paper
- grab your Z80 book and assemble to byte code, on paper
- grab your ZX-81 manual and translate byte code to ZX-81 characters (non-ASCII, IIRC!)
- write a BASIC program like this

1 REM <insert all them weird characters that make up your program here>
2 ...insert some POKEs here to start the ML program

</off-topic>

Here in Europe (at least in Spain) Commodore was not wery-well published. It was a successful in US but overseas Sinclair and Amstrad rules. MSX comes from Japan, as far as US for us, but japaneses do what the US doesn't know to do: sell computers

I did not know Commodore until the Amiga... nor Apple until de McIntosh. In 80's US computer sellers usually cares to sell inside their frontiers.

Anyway now I know both of them, and C64 doesn't have Konami cartridges... so I prefer MSX.

My dad used the msx for work (shop that now called super de boer), so we gotta have one too
and it was a NMS-8255, i learned from him.. WAIT.. is the led off, remove the disk ahh the good old days.. i HAD a Turbo-R GT it's dead