Moving Into a New Towns

There’s a lot of NEC computers on this blog, but tons of Japanese companies made great machines. Fujitsu, for instance, built a whole spectrum of computers. You’ve seen three of their 6809 machines in previous articles. Today, we’ll figure out how to get this sad 486-based FM Towns II to boot. Ideally, it should stay booted, too. Introduction What is the FM Towns? It would be easy to assume it’s a continuation from the 6809-based Fujitsu FM-8, Fujitsu FM-7, and Fujitsu FM-77… but not so! Fujitsu made their own PC-incompatible x86 system to compete with the considerable might of the NEC PC-9801. One of the big ways in which it differentiated itself from its rival was the introduction of a mandatory CD-ROM drive. With this as a standard feature, they were able to position the Towns as a “multimedia” computer of the future, rather than the dour and serious image of Japan’s so-called national computer. From what I can tell, its price was pretty close to that of the contemporary PC-98s…