By the beginning of 1979, even the least astute observers of the electronics scene were becoming aware of one important fact: the home computer was here to stay. It was, essentially, an idea whose time had come.

At this stage, the three big players were Apple, Commodore and Radio Shack with the Apple, Pet and TRS-80 respectively. MITS, the company that had started it all with the Altair, had been absorbed by Pertec and effectively disappeared. There were several other companies in the field but most of them, such as Imsai and North Star, were concentrating their efforts on the low end of the business sector. Several other companies were in the process of launching new machines aimed at the home market. The common thread here, of course, was that all these machines were made in America.

There were home computers being produced in other countries but they tended to be quirky machines with limited general appeal to the general public and none of them were likely to capture an international market. It came as rather a shock to everyone, then, when the Japanese Sharp Corporation suddenly released a sophisticated home computer that was better built than anything else on the market and came with a well planned set of supporting peripherals.

It shouldn't really have come as a surprise that the Japanese would want a part of what was clearly going to be a lucrative market. Sharp themselves had tested the water with a 'training kit' called the MZ40K a couple of years earlier, which was little more than a processor board with a hexadecimal keyboard and a 4 element LED display. It hadn't been a runaway success but it clearly encouraged the company.

The MZ-40K's successor, the MZ-80K, was an altogether different beast. Clearly borrowing heavily from the design of the first Commodore Pet, the Sharp machine was a clean machine in every sense. The solid metal chassis was obviously meant to withstand domestic misuse while the 40 column display was about fifteen per cent larger than that on the Pet, and of substantially better quality than those supplied with any of its American competitors.

The built-in cassette recorder, another feature that the MZ-80K shared with the Pet, was also a major selling point. At a time when very few hobbyists even knew that such things as floppy disks existed, built in tape storage was a very neat idea, in every sense. Although the cassete was not controlled from the keyboard, it still provided a reliable method of saving and restoring both programmes and data.

Sharp had, unfortunately, borrowed another, less appealing, feature from the original Pet: the square keyboard.

Given that few users would know how to touch type, this was less of a drawback than some commentators made it sound at the type, Nevertheless, the designers at Sharp were clearly stung by the criticism and the MZ-80Ks successors (oddly named the MZ-80A and MZ-80B) were both equipped with typewriter style keyboards.

The most interesting feature of the Sharp machine was that, unlike any of its main competitiors, the MZ-80K did not have BASIC in ROM. This appeared as a brave, if not foolhardy, move to some observers but it was actually a very clever ploy. It meant that not only could Sharp offer a range of languages from the beginning, but it would also encourage third parties to write languages and other software for the MZ-80K. The drawback was that, unlike a Pet or an Apple, you couldn't just turn on the computer and use it. Instead, you had to wait thirty or forty seconds while you ran in a language or other programme.

So not that much has changed, then….

Interestingly, one of the first companies to see the potential in the Sharp machine, was a small U.K. company based in the sea-side resort town of Torquay. Crystal Electronics released their Xtal BASIC very soon after the Sharp appeared, having written it originally for the British Nascom computer, which, like the MZ-80K, was a Z-80 based machine.

Just like the MZ-80K, the Nascom came with only a small machine code monitor in ROM, so porting the interpreter from the Nascom to the Sharp must have been a relatively simple job. Xtal BASIC quickly became the defacto standard for Sharp users. With many more features than Sharp's own offering and considerably more similarity to the widely used Microsoft BASIC, much less recoding was required to get listings from magazines to run on the Sharp machine.

The MZ-80K offered reasonable opportunities for expansion. The basic machine came with 16KB of memory, easily expanded to the maximum of 48KB. For further expansion, you could purchase an expansion card box that linked to the basic machine via a bus connector. This would accept “vaugely” S100 cards and a pair of 5.25 inch floppy disk drives. There was also a re-packaged Epson printer designed to fit well with the computer's appearance.

All in all, this was pretty well the best presented home computer that had been seen up to then. As a result, the Sharp was a success in both Japan and Europe, although it didn't do so well in the U.S., where the home grown opposition was just too well entrenched.

I aquired my own MZ-80K in 1980. I was managing a computer shop in Exeter and spent all day surrounded by high end equipment like the Panasonic JD 800. I'd exhausted, so far as I could see, my Acorn System 1's potential and was in a receptive state of mind when a customer asked if he could part-exchange his MZ-80K against a Pet. Officially, we had no policy to allow this but privately I made him what I considered a reasonable offer and he all but bit my arm off.

Frankly, I don't know what could have put him off the Sharp. It took me a little while to convert from the Acorn's 6502 code to the Sharp's Z80 but I soon found it to be a marvellous machine. Many happy hours were spent writing word processing and spreadsheet programmes for it, not to mention a little database utility, of which I was especially proud.

For a brief moment, it looked like the Japanese electronic companies would come to dominate the home computing market as they already dominated the consumer electronics business but, in the event, this was not to be. The entrance of the giant IBM corporation into the business upset many applecarts and the Japanese were only one among many victims of the inexorable rise of the PC.