French version  The Thomson MO5 emulator  English version

Historical context

The MO5 is a home computer which was designed and distributed by Thomson (a french company) in the early eighties. This machine was powered by the best processor in its category at that time, the 6809E from Motorola. The clock speed of this 8-bit processor was 1 MHz. The commercial success of this machine is mainly due to contracts from the french government whose goal was to spread computer science in the primary schools. (mainly by the "Informatique Pour Tous" project, 1985).

The MO5 micro-computer

Unfortunately, Thomson made a number of marketing mistakes, which contributed a lot to the end of the computer design department in 1989 (it was created in 1979). Some interesting projects, like a 68000-based computer (running the multitasking operating system OS/9-68000), would never come out.

Thomson designed the following machines (by order of appearence): TO7 (1981), MO5, TO7-70 (1984), TO9 (1985), MO6, TO8 (1986), TO8D, TO9+ (1987), all powered by the 6809E, and the TO16, a PC-XT compatible (1987), powered by the 8088-9.54MHz.

Technical specifications

Available peripherals

Other extensions exist, though not much sold:

Programming languages