Sord/CGL Advert - 23rd June 1983

The Japanese Sord M5, launched in October 1982 at the Tokyo Data Show^[1], was one of a handful of computers - a group which included the Sinclair ZX Spectrum and Jupiter Ace - that decided not to provide a standard space bar, instead choosing to offer "space" as a regular function key much the same size as the shift and enter keys, between which it is positioned.

It was distributed in the UK by Computer Games Limited - a company known for its Game & Match toys - as the CGL M5.

Echoing 1979's Transam Triton, it had different versions of BASIC available for it, which in the Sord's case were available as plug-in cartridges rather than pre-installed in ROM.

These were an integer-only variant called Basic-I, a graphics-heavy version called Basic-G and a fully-fledged floating-point version aimed at "Scientific, technological and statistical computing" called Basic-F.

It ran a 4MHz Zilog Z80-A which, combined with its other specs, including the same sound chip as the BBC Micro and an MSX-identical video chip^[2], made it similar to other pure-MSX machines available at around the same time, like Toshiba and Mitsubishi's models.

It retailed for £195 - about £730 in 2024 money - for the version that you could actually do something with, although there was a cheaper model at £150 with only 4K of free RAM - about the same as the VIC-20 from two years before.

The M5 didn't do that well. Its price put it in what was called at the time "the ferocious under-£200 market"^[3] but it was more expensive than its contemporaries like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum or Commodore's 64 - both of which were well-established and had thousands of software titles behind them.

It also seemed to suffer from poor documentation, with Popular Computing Weekly suggesting in its review that owners should get hold of a Memotech manual as that "contains all they should need".

Lack of detailed technical information could affect the ability of third parties to write software if information on system variables and the machine's memory map was hard to come by - a problem which contributed to the downfall of Texas Instruments' TI-99/4 and which also affected Atari, which chose to restrict "secret" system information to only developers who would sign a non-disclosure agreement.

Unsurprisingly, most of those developers all buggered off to write for someone else's machine instead.

Despite these issues, its parent company - founded in Japan in 1970 by Takayoshi Shiina - survived and was eventually bought out by Toshiba in 1999^[4], which had acquired a 38% stake in the company in March 1985^[5].