The ASCII corp. haven't ever made any MSX'x. It have just made the standard. So where the profit of this company were from? The Sony, Panasonic, etc. who have actually made the computers had to pay some licence to Ascii for using their MSX standard, or trademark??

Hmm, the MSX trademark was owned by Microsoft until somewhere in the late late 80's...

I'm interested in this question too! Does anyone have an idea?

I think the license for the MSX system itself (so not the trademark, but allowing companies to actually build MSX compatible computers), but also the MSX books & magazines earned quite some money for ASCII Corporation.

So, do you mean that the companies should pay to Ascii to build and sell computers that follow the MSX standard created by the ASCII corp?

But thinking that they get revenue by the books and magazines don't seem logical to me. Ok, they could have made some money from this but noone would ever project a new computer system to have profit from the books about it as a main source of money.

The first idea seems more logical, althought it still seems to me that something is not quite right yet... Do anyone in here have something more concrete (or new thoughts) to say?

Nishi talked about licensing the one-chip-MSX as well. Of course income from licenses are far more interesting than income from books. MSX-DOS2 and the turboR were 'full ASCII' products IIRC.

MSX-DOS2 is a full ASCII product?! What do you mean??? This is not a Microsoft product?

Indeed, it was developed by an English software company, ASCII had the rights IIRC.

Wow! I didn't know that!
Do you know the name of this English company?

Ascii had to pay microsoft for that? Or this english company have made this DOS2 all over from the start? (I mean: The MSXDOS2 kernel code is different from MSXDOS1?)

(And the most intriguing part: what the hell is iirc?!?)

iirc stands for If I Remember Correctly (first I thought it meant It Is Really Cool )

Ahmmm... Much better now.. Thanks!

The english company that developed DOS2 is called Madge.

ASCII is a book/magazine publisher, so them making money of the MSX standard through their books and documentation is a very plausible scenario.

If I'm correct, ASCII is not only a book/magazine publisher, but a software publisher as well. Not only for MSX, but for more recent systems as well...

Geez, how come a keyboard doesn't react normally when you have had some drinks?

Indeed, many ASCII software titles were sold as well. As far as I know ASCII is only publishing books and magazines at the moment. No more hardware, no more software...

Yeah but for a company that only sell books and magazines to launch a computer system, is not very usual... But thanks God the did, ehhe

Unusual, yes, but remember MSX was Nishi's idea, who was working for Microsoft Far East at the time. Nishi took his MSX idea to ASCII later.