Sanyo Advert - July 1985

Caught in the oncoming headlights of IBM's 5150 juggernaut comes this advert from Sanyo for its MBC-550 and 550 microcomputers.

Continuing the "See Sanyo, the decide" theme of its earlier adverts, it's a brave attempt - in a market rapidly moving towards uniformity and compatibility with the IBM PC and MS-DOS - to sell the MBC's incompatibility with IBM as a feature, arguing that for many small business it doesn't matter.

It even not-so-subtly has a dig at people buying IBM simply for compatibility reasons by comparing them to sheep.

The advert goes on to argue that not offering superfluous features in order to achieve compatiblity means that Sanyo's machines offer real savings, which was probably not far off given that the entry level MBC 550-2 was just £999 plus VAT, or around £4,620 in 2026, making it the cheapest clone available at the time, at less than a third the cost of a comparable IBM PC^[1].

When it first appeared, Bill Sudbrink, writing in the August 1984 edition of Byte - The Small Systems Journal, thought that the classified advert he spotted for the machine must have had a typo in it when it came to the price quoted.

Upon phoning up and being told that the price was indeed correct, the immediate thought was "what's wrong with it?", but despite that reaction one was purchased the next day.

Byte's extensive review of the machine, which appeared to be based solely on the supplied software and the resident BASIC, concluded:

"Having now owned a Sanyo MBC-550 for four months, I am very pleased with this machine. The MBC-550 is more computing machine for the dollar than any other personal computer on the market. Because it offers compatibility with the IBM PC and other 8088-based systems, the MBC-550 will never run short of software. With a large organization like Sanyo behind it and a price one-third that of comparable machines, the Sanyo MBC-550 is a good buy^[2]".

The slightly-better twin floppy model - the MBC 555-2 - was £1,390 plus VAT, and even apparently came with £1,000 of free software.

That was possibly necessary as although the MBC did in fact run MS-DOS, much commercially-available software wouldn't actually run on it.

The MBC range had been launched in the spring of 1984 and was manufactured on a completely automated production line^[3].

However, it didn't remain on the market for long as by the summer of 1985 the company had announced a campaign to sell off stocks of the MBC-550 in order to "clear the way for a new line of fully-compatible machines", its incompatibility having become a significant issue.

That was despite the launch by Sanyo US of a $199 video card which at least enabled Lotus 1-2-3, SuperCalc and Volkswriter to run, but even then these programs would not function in full graphics mode^[4].