Pity it came a bit too early to add it as a nominee...

Can I conclude from the meager reactions that the MSX has been only a hobby computer and not really used as a professional computer science tool?

Ofcourse, it's kind of obvious that the MSX was targeted for home users, but it's a litte disappointing...

You know the MIR, right? The Russian space station which was sent down to earth some years ago? Inside there was a Sony HB-F900P for some purposes which I don't recall exactly. In any case, it was used as a powerful scientific tool

I think the real problem was that it was a different time. Most of us were in school and back then there hardly were any assignments needing a computer. I was coding assembly when the teachers were working on turtle based languages. There just was no point to it.

I remember doing my Pascal excercises for university (that was already 91/92) on my msx though. But that was maybe all of 10 minutes work as they were quite lame.

I have written a few report on my msx though, but that was really one of the first things I switched over to the pc for. The msx has no software capable of writing a decent scientific report. But then again, M$ word still comes crashing down on those. LaTeX saved me there.

But to make a long story short. My use as "home pc" mostly exceeded the professional needs by far.

regarding homework on MSX:

For my study I used MBFM once, as the end-project of a sound-design-semester was: "make a composition based on simple FM (that's 2-op FM, sine-based), and 8 channels max. you can use 1 DSP effect (such as reverb)". Well so I did, 8-channel FM and a reverb from the PC.. The Dutch sounddesigner and FM-guru Ernst Bonis (you can spot his name in early MCM's (try 8 or 9) in relation to a CX5m club orso) liked it a lot, and after 3 years he actually still remembered the impact that tune made on him.. funny since he didn't really know me as I never followed his class, as he suddenly quit teaching for a while after familly-related issues.

Now, during the performance of my piece in the group I ofcourse heavily degraded the used source-equipment See, there's all kinda ppz there who used all kinda pro-stuff etc. etc. All bragging about their techniques, how they setup their reverbs, what sysex-magic they used, what software and freaky controllers, which synths they used (TX81z, DX7, SY77 you name it) And then mentioning that my piece came from a typical soundcard from a stone-age computer was ofcourse fun, esp. as that highly respected Ernst Bonis couldn't understand why it sounded the way it did. In one of the studios I found an external MSX diskdrive btw .. it seemed an MSX was used ages ago .. the CX5m perhaps? In the fourth year I went to Bonis' home in Tilburg, made a chat, and returned home with an extra mentioning for sound-design on my graduation-papers (after following 0 lessons from him)

I couldn't tell on which disk I stored my tune btw.. anyway, it's useless without reverb. It was heavily based on the original Coral-theme btw

I remember using MPW for typing some text and Dynamic Publisher for some school related publications.

Later on I also did some work using Turbo Pascal and even tried once or twice Microsoft Cobol for doing my homework. Not a good idea, Microsoft Cobol isn't compatible with the Cobol of the AS/400 I used in school.

I guess I can say that most of the time MSX was preventing me from doing homework rather than helping

I've seen some MSX used for professional applications tho. The pizza shop where I did summer job used a 8250 for accouting. And the Police station of the city where I lived had a bunch of 8280 with digitizing software for storing pictures of suspects. No idea if they stored those on floppies, that seemed like a strange idea.