Back in the 80s the Commodore 64 was undoubtfully the best selling home computer in Italy; Here in Venice, the city where I still live, I saw many friends of mine that had one of them, getting cool at school while exchanging their games (rigorously on tape).

I had a Commodore 64 too. Well... in theory. A brand new and really expensive computer with a floppy drive and a daisy wheel printer! But all that cool stuff was not mine It was property of my father, that used to print menus and cards for his restaurant with that equipment. Sometimes I was able to use it for playing short games such as Burgertime and Donkey Kong, while my father keep an eye on me, always terrorized because he was thinking that sooner or later I would be able to delete all his precious WORDSTAR documents

So, the day of my eleventh birthday (back in 1985) he decided to purchase me a home computer, just for me (it is so nice to have no brothers
An MSX computer... a Philips VG-8020 with a tape recorder and even a game on cartridge (Athletic land). Some years later I even managed to get a strange thing called "QUICKDISK DRIVE"... a failed attempt to give MSX a decent drive, before the 3,5" era: infact it was a drive for some strange 2,8" disks with 64Kb of free space per side, and the disks didn't have random access... all the data on them was sequential like on a tape!
For example if you had five games on a disk and you wanted to delete the second game from it, you had to delete the last four games!

Obviously I never saw any games on Quickdisk. I just managed to purchase, many years later, a stupid financial account program made by Philips ("BILANCIO FAMILIARE PER QUICKDISK" - VG8581), wrapped inside a strange floppy case that I suspect used to be an old videopac/odissey2 cartridge case.

Then, in 1986, I saw in a shop something that made me proud of being an Italian citizen

THIS:



You see, this is probably not always true but... as a citizen IMHO Italians doesn't have a great sense of unity, at least not as much as you would expect from other people like English, Dutch or French. You can see italian flags or people singing the national anthem just when our national football team wins a world cup

Probably you never felt this... essentially because if you are dutch you had Philips as your national brand, if you are french you had Thomson... but for me... well, that was different. "LOOK AT THAM, OMG! FINALLY A HOME COMPUTER MADE BY AN ITALIAN FACTORY! "

Some years later I discovered that (unfortunately) it was just a relabelled korean MSX
And no, not even the Olivetti home computers were *real* home computer made in Italy

Hi Cesco,

I'm Italian too, and you know me quite well. I like to read all those thing about Italian MSX users, and I think during these past 10 years we've done a good job to "create more unity" (for ex. msxitalia ML and Freesoft Magazine).
Yes, Fenner was a trademark of Redi Elettronica - Vicenza, but it was made by Samsung.
Many years ago I wrote to Redi to know more about Fenner MSX, but no reply...
That Fenner model is well know and common today too, but I've found these models in a Fenner brochure:
http://www.faq.msxnet.org/hardware.html#Fenner
To manuel: I have to re-scan all pages in a higher resolution :-)

Eh eh, Mr. Barbisan...

I expected a story about Rocky Balboa....

Yeah, drinking eggs for breakfast, that's the real deal!

He, he, you underestimate all the work made by Italian users during the 80s and 90s...
(Un/)Official magazines, software, peripeherals and moddings.
"Italian MSX adventure" is almost unknown to the rest of the world.
MSX in Italy will be the today's MSX in Korea?