The Thomson MO5 hides most of its BASIC vocabulary on the keyboard itself: press the dedicated BASIC key together with a letter and the machine drops a whole keyword such as PRINT or GOTO onto the screen, a trick borrowed from Sinclair's ZX81 and Spectrum. Underneath that spongy black "clavier gomme" sat a machine built at the French government's request and priced at 2,390 francs, cheap enough to reach classrooms the costlier Thomson TO7/70 never would.
Why it matters
The MO5 mattered less as a piece of engineering than as a policy instrument. France's Plan Informatique pour Tous put around 120,000 computers into schools by September 1985, with Thomson supplying both the MO5 and the TO7/70 as the core hardware, and roughly half a million MO5 units were sold in total before Thomson withdrew from microcomputing in 1989. It gave a generation of French schoolchildren their first hands-on contact with a keyboard and a screen, at a scale no other French manufacturer matched. The scheme was later judged a failure by the government's own inspectorate, undone by rushed teacher training and a curriculum that never kept pace with the rollout, but that was a failure of planning rather than of the machine Thomson's engineers built to a tight budget and an even tighter deadline.
What to check before you buy
- Test the K7 cassette recorder on its own before trusting it to load anything; drive belts perish and it's the easiest single point of failure to isolate.
- Check any replacement power adapter's polarity before connecting it; the MO5 wants 17V DC with a centre-negative plug, and getting this wrong is a well-documented way to kill the machine.
- Try every key on an early rubber-dome unit; there's no drop-in replacement membrane, so a dead key means a repair job rather than a swap.
- Confirm exactly which accessories are included; the light pen, joysticks and Mémo5 cartridge port peripherals are often missing from listings that only photograph the console.
- Treat a scrambled but stable picture as a motherboard fault to investigate rather than a dead unit; it's rarely the SCART lead or the television at fault.
