Alternate timeline: Tandy remains dominant in home PC market

[Kalvan]

They would have needed to have started ca. 1982.  Have them contact Fujitsu and see if they can work together on the follow-up to the FM-8/7 as the CoCo 3.  Possibly contact Hitachi and together from a SIG based around the 6309 and H8 series, so that both companies could have had better CPUs for cheaper than the gouge Motorola was demanding for the 6809.  The FM-77 in a keyboard-console form factor could have been the CoCo3, and the the FM-77 A/V could have been an ATL CoCo4. 

 

Then, when the FM Towns is coming out, market a version of that in America, but minus the kanji ROM, and with cut down entry-level versions that omit the CD-ROM drive, but keep the DeskMate GUI.  Call it the Tandy 5000/10,000.*

 

*replace the Yamaha YM2612 with the WM3812, to provide compatibility with SoundBlater and AdLib functionality, and the Ricoh RF5c68 with the Ensoniq DOC II, OTIS, or OTTO, along with the existing Texas Instruments SN76496 clone.

[EMwhite]

So many parallels to the music keyboard/synth manufacturers of the 70's, 80's and 90's.  No standards at first, each company innovating rapidly for market share.  Big players and niche players going about it in different ways, some standardization with Midi for control and note encoding parity but ultimately, nearly all perished except for Japanese giants Yamaha and to a much lesser extent, Korg and a handful of re-issue / re-starts from Moog, Sequential Circuits (Dave Smith), Tom Oberheim, shells of their former operations.

The point is that 'vision' was a problem, as it always is.  Horse-blinder/tunnel vision nearly cost Steve Jobs Apple a few times, and definitely cost the technology focused founders of synth their fortune: David Pearlman, Tom Oberheim, Bob Moog, Dave Smith, David Cockerell, Ray Kurzweil, Wolfgang Palm and others...