The Thomson MO5 is a home computer introduced in France in June 1984 to compete against systems such as the ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64. It had a release price of 2390 FF.
At the same time, Thomson also released the up-market Thomson TO7/70 machine. The MO5 was not sold in vast quantities outside France and was largely discontinued in favour of the improved Thomson MO6 in 1986.
MO5s were used as educational tools in French schools for a period (see Computing for All, a French government plan to introduce computers to the country's pupils), and could be used as a "nano-machine" terminal for the "Nanoréseau" educational network.
The computer boots directly to the built-in Microsoft BASIC interpreter (MO5 Basic 1.0).
Graphics were generated by a EFGJ03L (or MA4Q-1200) gate array In memory, the bit order was PBGR. The desaturated colours were obtained by mixing of the original RGB components within the video hardware. This is done by a PROM circuit, where a two bit mask controls colour mixing ratios of 0%, 33%, 66% and 100% of the saturated hue.
Software
Around two hundred software titles are known to exist for the MO5.
Variants
thumb|Thomson MO5 Platini
MO5 Michel Platini
The MO5 was sold in a version featuring a mechanical keyboard and a white casing, in a limited edition named MO5 Michel Platini.
Thomson MO5E
An improved version, named Thomson MO5E ("E" for "Export", a model designed for foreign markets) was presented in 1985. It had a different casing featuring a mechanical keyboard, a parallel port, two joystick ports, an internal PAL modulator and an integrated power supply. Sound was also improved, with four voices and seven octaves. Memory was expanded to 128 KB and the machine came with a new version of BASIC (Microsoft Basic 128 1.0). and the MO5NR could generate 4096 colours, and display up to 16 simultaneously depending on the resolution used: