FM Towns

The FM Towns (エフエムタウンズ, Efu Emu Taunzu) system is a Japanese PC variant, built by Fujitsu from February 1989 to the summer of 1997. It started as a proprietary PC variant intended for multimedia applications and PC games, but later became more compatible with regular PCs. In 1993, the FM Towns Marty was released, a gaming console compatible with existing FM Towns games.

The "FM" part of the name means "Fujitsu Micro" like their earlier products, while the "Towns" part is derived from the code name the system was assigned while in development, "Townes". This refers to Charles Townes, one of the winners of the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics, following a custom of Fujitsu at the time to code name PC products after Nobel Prize winners. The e in "Townes" was dropped when the system went into production to make it clearer that the term was to be pronounced like the word "towns" rather than the potential "tow-nes".

History

Fujitsu, which had the best-selling 8-bit home computer FM-7, and the Fujitsu Micro 16s PC in early 1980s in Japan, decided to release a new home computer after the FM-7 was overcome by NEC's PC-8801 computer. From this experience, Fujitsu learned that software sales drove hardware sales. In order to acquire usable software quickly, the new computer was to be based on Fujitsu's "FMR50" system architecture. The FMR50 system, released at 1986, was another x86/DOS-based computer similar to NEC's popular PC-9801. The FMR50 computers were sold to moderate success in Japanese offices, particularly in Japanese government offices. There were hundreds of software packages available for the FMR, including Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, Multiplan, and dBASE III. With this basis of compatibility, the more multimedia-friendly FM Towns was born.