Talk:FM Towns

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Name[edit]

I thought "FM" stood for "Fujitsu Maikon"? 「マイコン」 (maikon) is an abbreviation of the English word "microcomputer" in Japanese, and was used quite often (they seem to like their 4-syllable abbreviations), much like 「パソコン」 (pasokon; abbrev. of personal computer) is used to refer to PCs. --Zilog Jones 19:42, 16 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

No, FM stands for "Fujitsu Micro" historically. Fujitsu's first personal computer on 1981 was named Fujitsu Micro 8 (FM-8) and its successors all have the FM prefix (FM-7, FM-77, FM-11, FM-R, FM/V etc.)

219.113.144.250 21:51, 28 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Another theory for the dropping of the "e" in "FM Town[e]s": Couldn't it be that the pronounced "e" would have reminded too much of NES (Nintendo Entertainment System)? Just a thought that came in my mind when pronouncing it orally ... -andy 80.129.81.251 16:05, 8 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The NES was released in Japan as the Nintendo Family Computer (commonly abbreviated Famicom or FC). I don't think many people in Japan at that time would immediately make the connection that you are. 71.13.230.198 (talk) 12:38, 24 July 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Mac Classic[edit]

I don't understand the comparison with the Macintosh Color Classic. The FM Towns I've seen have a tower case that connects to an external monitor; that fits with the description in the details section. Was there an FM Towns with a built-in display? Apple's first machines with bundled GUI OS and color graphics came out in 1987 (the Apple II/GS and Macintosh II. Not sure which was first.) rakslice 10:03, 3 November 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Emulator name change[edit]

I changed the Emulators name. Its うんづ prononced Untzu —Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.160.113.85 (talk) 03:41, 9 April 2008 (UTC)[reply]

386 SX/DX?[edit]

Was the 1st system really 386 _SX_ (not DX) based? Quote from the wikipedia article: "the first system was based on an Intel 80386SX" ... "with a possible maximum of 64 MB" RAM. 386SX can support a maximum of 16MB RAM.

Does anyone have informations about expansion bus options (like ISA, EISA, C-Bus etc.) and available cards (e.g. Ethernet)? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 178.1.233.244 (talk) 21:56, 22 June 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Remember that the early 386 DX systems from Compaq were over $20K US! A lot of that was the CPU. It's quite likely that it was a 386 SX in the first versions just to be able to sell them at a profit. I'll go see if I can find any references to the list of CPUs in each model, though. By the way, why wasn't there any sections? Weird... I restored them so this is a lot more organized and readable. 71.196.246.113 (talk) 01:44, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Notable?[edit]

Operating system
The FM Towns was capable of booting its Towns OS, a graphical, GUI OS straight from CD in 1989, a full 7 years before the boot-from-CD capable Windows 95B OSR2 was released in 1996 (and that was still not to run the OS, but for installation purposes only).

Not too impressive when compared to the fact that almost ALL computers in the 1980s booted off of floppy disk drives, cassette tapes, or cartridges. It was probably the first to boot off of CD that wasn't a game system, though... And likely one of the earliest with a builtin GUI. It would be interesting to find out which machines did it first and post the references here so we could see it easily instead of having to rely on original research. Original research is hard as heck to avoid with computer articles, though.  ;(
Top candidates: Sega CD/Megadrive, Apple IIGS (through bootable SCSI controller firmware), Amiga, FM Towns
If I wanted to be pedantic, I could say that a CD with a sampled copy of a tape cassette could be used to boot even an old 1979 Apple II through the 3.5mm line in jack but that would be unrealistic. I don't remember too many CD burners back then, nor would it make sense to use an expensive player to boot a system slower than if you used a cheap $0.25 floppy disk... :P


Apple II CD-ROM FAQ http://fjkraan.home.xs4all.nl/comp/apple2faq/app2cdromfaq.html Finding the release dates of those CD-ROMs shouldn't be too hard. They have copyright info for one thing. Most programs have release notes that show the dates certain features were added. This FAQ is noteworthy because it's created and updated by the experts in the community.
I'm not an Amiga expert so I don't even know where to go to get this information. It had CD-ROM support but I'm not sure if any firmware supports directly booting the OS off of a CD. The OS didn't even use enough space to justify this (<2MB) but a CD-R with all your applications would have made sense around about 1996. The CD32 most certainly was bootable off CD, heh. See the article on it.
Megadrive release date is on the Sega CD article's page. It's October 29, 1988 in Japan. The OS wasn't really what most people would consider a GUI or even an OS. The 'OS' (read: tools built in to the board's firmware) was just a simple media player, game saves manager, and loader. It was totally replaced by the games when they ran. Only the BIOS (in firmware) remained.
Still doing research on FM Towns. I hope I can find a good and reliable reference. The FM Towns Marty was definitely a 386SX version. There were 386 SX, 386 DX, and 486 DX versions. Details seem hard to find with English sites. ISBN-13: 978-1409212775 "Vintropedia" has a list which you can see on Google books. The FM Towns II was a 386 SX version which was presumably a budget model. The FM Towns I doesn't say if it was a SX or DX. The FM Towns CXII had a 386DX. There was a 486DX in both the FM Towns II EX and MX. The FM Towns II UX20 had a 386SX. The FM Towns Model 2 is listed as having a 386DX.

71.196.246.113 (talk) 01:39, 12 January 2012 (UTC)[reply]

The Amiga CDTV was definitely bootable from CD, released in early 1991. It was basically an A500 with a cdrom drive in a fancy case. The A570 addon CD-ROM drive for the A500 which basically turned it into a CDTV wasn't released until 1992 - but owing to the amiga architecture was also bootable from CDROM like a CDTV - add-on hardware designed for the amiga could supply drivers from onboard roms at boot time. It was certainly possible to connect a generic SCSI CD-ROM drive on a SCSI bus to other existing earlier pre-1991 Amigas too, but bootability is a complex question - probably no-one outside Commodore-Amiga engineering group would have tried to do it until after the CDTV came out, but I could be wrong there. After the CDTV, there was of course stronger incentive to allow it in order to run CDTV (and later CD32) software, but a range of approaches. By far the most common, rather than taking advantage of aforementioned fancy rom driver mechanisms, was a purely software hack - on cold boot, drivers to allow/emulate cd boot would just be loaded from internal harddrive, see e.g. MountCD, made reset-resident (persistent across warm reboots) and used.

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