In 1982, desktop computers were coming into their own, and no clear leaders had emerged. But everyone knew they wanted a piece of the action. This led to, among other things, Sony’s SMC-70, which, frankly, for 1982, was a good-looking, if not oddball, machine. [Tech Tangents] shows the machine off in a recent video.

From the front, the computer looks more-or-less like everything else. But as you move backward, you can see this computer wasn’t another typical entry into the market. One of the things that was the hallmark of successful business computers of the day was expandability. The earlier Altair had the later-titled S100 bus. The IBM PC had the ISA bus. But in both cases, you had to open the box to plug and unplug cards.

The SMC-70, though, had a very unique system. Instead of boards, users would line up modules and stab them with what amounted to skewers to mechanically secure the stack of modules. You could stack some modules vertically or horizontally using ribbon cables or external cables. This particular box needed some power supply work, and a 3D printer lets it look essentially stock.

Computing-wise, the SMC-70 was pretty typical. A CP/M machine with a 4 MHz Z-80 wasn’t novel then, although few CP/M systems had 3.5-inch floppies. What set the Sony apart was its 16-color graphics system, which was well ahead of its time. It even had some sound capability.

It also had a module that offered quite a bit of video output capability, which shouldn’t be surprising given Sony’s other product lines. There was, apparently, an 8086 module that eventually became available, but it was late and didn’t run MS-DOS (but could run CP/M-86).

A few nice features didn’t catch on. A dedicated red help button on the keyboard was a nice idea, for example. There was even a RAM disk mode, which was great if you didn’t suffer power outages.

Of course, Sony made many more computers. If you want to play with a CP/M machine, you probably could get a virtual one up in a few minutes.