s bundled with the Model D. It was favorably reviewed by the computer press and sold very well.
By the mid-80s the market for inexpensive PCs for use in the home market was expanding at a rate such that the two leaders in the USA, Commodore and Atari, themselves felt compelled to enter the market with their own lines. They were only marginally successful compared to other companies that made only PCs.
Still later prices of white box PC clone computers by various manufacturers became competitive with the higher-end home computers (see below). Throughout the 1980s costs and prices continued to be driven down by: advanced circuit design and manufacturing, multifunction expansion cards, shareware applications such as PC-Talk, PC-Write, and PC-File, greater hardware reliability, and more user-friendly software that demanded less customer support services. The increasing availability of faster processor and memory chips, inexpensive EGA and VGA video cards, sound cards, and joystick adapters also bolstered the viability of PC/DOS computers as alternatives to specially-made computers and game consoles for the home.
From about 1985 the high end of the home computer market began to be dominated by "next generation" home computers using the 16-bit Motorola 68000 chip, which enabled the greatly increased abilities of the Amiga and Atari ST series (in the UK the Sinclair QL was built around the Motorola 68008 with its external 8-bit bus). Graphics resolutions approximately doubled to give roughly NTSC-class resolution, and color palettes increased from dozens to hundreds or thousands of colors available. The Amiga was built with a custom chipset with dedicated graphics and sound coprocessors for high performance video and audio. The Amiga found use as a workstation for motion video, a first for a standalone computer costing far less than dedicated motion-video processing equipment costing many thousands of dollars. Stereo sound became standard for the first time; the Atari ST gained popularity as an affordable alternative for MIDI equipment for the production of music.
Clock rates on the 68000-based systems were approximately 8 MHz with RAM capacities of 256 KB (for the base Amiga 1000 ) up to 1024 KB (1 megabyte, a milestone, first seen on the Atari 1040ST). These systems used 3.5" floppy disks from the beginning but 5.25" drives were made available to facilitate data exchange with IBM PC compatibles. The Amiga and ST both had GUIs with windowing technology. These were inspired by the Apple Macintosh, but at a list price of US$2495 (equivalent to $5,800in 2018), the Macintosh itself was too expensive for most households. The Commodore Amiga in particular had true multitasking capability and unlike all other low-cost computers of the era could run multiple applications in their own windows.
MSX was a standard for a home computing architecture that was intended and hoped to become a universal platform for home computing. It was conceived, engineered and marketed by Microsoft Japan with ASCII Corporation.Computers conforming to the MSX standard were produced by most all major Japanese electronics manufacturers, as well as two Korean ones and several others in Europe and South America. Some 5 million units are known to have been sold in Japan alone. They sold in smaller numbers throughout the world. Due to the "price wars" being waged in the USA home computer market during the 1983-85 period, MSX computers were never marketed to any great extent in the USA. Eventually more advanced mainstream home computers and game consoles obsoleted the MSX machines.
The MSX computers were built around the Zilog Z80 8-bit processor, assisted with dedicated video graphics and audio coprocessors supplied by Intel, Texas Instruments, and General Instrument. MSX computers received a great deal of software support from the traditional Japanese publishers of game software, but never garnered such support from publishers of productivity applications. Microsoft did, however, produce a special version of the BASIC programming language that ran under MSX.
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