Sony's First Computer – The SMC-70 from 1982 [video]

Consider that the C64 was also launched in 1982 for a much cheaper price and was available in non-NTSC regions too, so would have had a bigger software library available to it.

Many people can put up with less convenience with peripherals if you're paying an order of magnitude less up front.

Even the software on cassette and 5.25" disk would have been so much cheaper to distribute than the newly launched 3.5" disks (which were much better).

I think it talked more about MSX. By the time it came to the states it was already competing with other better established things like Commodore. And then once the IBM PC became the big thing they really didn’t have anything special to offer. It was just another set of machines that, well built well, weren’t really any different.

Racism and protectionism probably played into it some, given the time period. But mostly their offerings weren’t as unique here. So many computers weren’t practical in Asia since they didn’t support any of the local character sets so at home they weren’t competing that much with those.

So in the end none of the brands really succeeded. They became a huge place to manufacture PCs for a long time, but it was almost always under someone else’s name.