My parents bougth me one in 1984. I was fourtheen. I programmed a "pac man like" game on that computer, and adapted a text-based monopoly game to graphics using TPM, which had basic with graphics. Very good memory. I also had a RX80 FT+ printer...
My first computer!
Very good computer except the fact that almost nobody else uses it! There was a "user group" in Montréal area, I even "sold" (well I gave it away, but they gave me money for it!) my games... made something like 50-100$ that I wasn't expected.
Some of the members of the user group had the MSDOS card, but if I remember right, it was as costly as a complete PC, so I moved on and bougth.. an Atari ST!
Thanks for the review, even if the "CP+" was not included with my QX10, but TPM was.

I think our generation had to advantage of being forced to learn how to code and code efficiently. I hold a tablet in my hand and, even though I am a computer programmer by profession, I have to scratch my head about how to program it and do so efficiently. On the other hand, limited however we may have been given the technology of the day and/or the lack of cheap software (not talking about pirating software), I could turn on one of these machines and just start programming. Add it it one of the leading magazines, and you had the fun times of copying pages long listings into your computer. Ah, the good ol days!

A nice example of Japanese 8-bit technology.  The Epson QX-10
http://youtu.be/Oz1BIIaeF44

I had an Epson QX-10 that my mother gave to me in the 80s. I was around 11-12. I remember the Valdocs suite (which I didn't use much); I remember my first steps into Basic programming; But the thing that I remember the most is the games it came with: Underground City, Omegatron, Flyboy, and Mission QC-10. Good memories. For years I tried to research if somebody had ported them or if there was an emulator. Unfortunately they seem to be lost forever.

I have a QX-10, from family, however it is lacking a keyboard, and I’m struggling to find exactly what it supports in DIN connectors, any help on where to find a keyboard for this?

You took me to 1987. I was an chemical engineering student in Ankara and had written some engineering programs by fortran4 under CP/M operating system. I remember that the PIP command was same as COPY on CP/M. Executable extension was REL...
Crazy, 30 years past!...
Thanks for your sharing Terry...

I used to have one of these as well. Epson eventually came out with an MS-DOS version to compete with the IBM and its clones. I think for a while they even had an MS-DOS card that fit in one of the expansion slots.

very nice terry!!! i like the epson qx-10 alot!! would love to see the games!

This seems to be one of the few times I've heard of Epson getting into full-blown computers. Most people nowadays only really know of them for printers and peripherals, and I'm assuming they are rebadged products? Shows how those 40 years went. Oofs!

I can see how CP/M was the grandfather to the PC with its useful business application software - Something home 8-bits didn't really have (except maybe the Apple II with 80 column expansion). But how Epson thought the QX10 was better than the PC is beyond me. And then to compare it to the Mac is pretty surreal. It would be good if I could read the text in the ad to get a better understanding of their argument but I can't seem to find it online.

I bought a QX-10 back in the day. At the time the PC was still running DOS 1.x and there was little software.
Mine came with 256k; used the extra ram as a ramdisk. Came with CP/M, Valdocs, and CP+. ED was terrible, but it turns out you could set the Valdocs word processor to text only. MUCH better for writing code! FORTRAN actually. Kept the compiler & linker on the ramdisk to speed things up.
Finally realized the IBM PC was taking over the world, so I sold mine & bought a Compaq Portable to retain a good text/graphics mix. Kept that until prices came down & got a turbo XT clone with EGA. Finally color & hires text at the same time!!

Thank you. I spent many pleasurable hours on a qx10 back in the 80s and early 90s. Your video brought back some great memories.

I’m amazed how many times Epson had changed their logo since the 80s

In addition to the keyboard issue, the monitor has quite the issue of not showing any images.

I still have a bunch of QX-10 and QX-16 computers. I also have Valdocs and CP/M..ALl for sale.

I used one of these at college which of course I was pretty impressed with as my home computer in those days was a sinclair zx spectrum i'm not sure why i was impressed as it was a piece of crap really probably thought it was more of a real computer than the spectrum.

I wonder how useful the graphics chip (NEC 7220) in there would actually be for accelerating high res games (in colour), when the CPU is just a Z80? There were obviously only a few, aside from Infocom adventures I've seen the documentation for Star Destroyer, which sounds like simple shooting game, and the back of the Math Professor package shows some stuff hinting at some capability.

VALDOCS (Let me google that for you...)
https://winworldpc.com/product/valdocs/200
http://www.electronicdesign.com/blog/rising-star

They 1/3rd height floppy drives. Epson made their own, and even made a half height 3.5" and 5.25" combined in one unit. Very uncommon nowadays.

no hard-drive?

For 3 years I watched the other videos because I assumed this was an Epson printer video. Not that a dot matrix printer video would be a bad addition. It's pretty cool that this is actually an Epson computer.

Holy shit, 640 by 480 pixels done by an 8bit system, that's mind blowing,all other 8 bit systems can only do 1/3th that resolution.

I had an attorney who used an Epson QX 10 well into the 1990s!

Hello friend, how are you on this fine day. I just wanted to say I enjoy your videos and the presentation is superb. I wanted to ask though do you have any Wang computers in your collection? I worked with a Wang server system to print out data for a car service for a large law firm in New York City in the mid eighties to early 1990 's I do not remember the model but it was a very large floorstanding machine networked to the data processing center upstairs. I was in charge of maintaining the printouts on a daily basis from this gigantic Epson line printer. please let me know if you have ever worked with Wang computer as always thank you for your high quality videos thank you.

Anyone... looking for working Valdocs disks and proper OS disk to run it with. Thanks!

We had one of these in my elementary school, it had an excellent space invaders type game called Underground City, doing some research on that, it seems the disk had a form of copy protection on it so you may need to try and track down an original disk to play it.

I have the American version with numerous versions of ValDocs, an outboard 20MB hard drive, an IBM emulator board and a box full of CP/M software. It all still worked last time I dragged it out of the shed about 3 years ago. Want another one. :)

WordStar 4!!!!!!!!!!!! :) - old and best ... loved as much as DBASE3! .. on PC

Hello All, I have a QX10 available if anyone is interested. Purchased new by me in the mid 80's. Everything works. CPM & TPM programming. DBASE II included. Tons of floppy's. Get back to me at rdyke@optonline.net. Make an offer. Thanks, Ron

The book won't be released until the very end of the month. It is one that's going to be around for a long time. ValDocs was far ahead of its time, but the system had many bugs. Roger Amidon created QX-CureAll to fix damaged documents, but it was only about 30% effective. Thanks for sharing this video. 

The Epson QX-10 computer is mentioned in the novel LIFE AIN'T KIND.

Great to see this working. I used to sell these at a computer store back in the 80's.
There were a couple of games one of which was a space game but I don't recall any details about it. Very well designed machine but lack of software kind of killed it.

Interesting. A friend is moving and handed me two of QX-10s with monitors. I'd almost forgotten Epson was in the PC market.

Opps, it's been made known to me that Wang never brought out a CP/M machine. The machine I'm thinking of must have been made by someone else.

Very clever move to take the PSU out of the monitor, lost could of the ammount of old "Flatbed" computers from the 90's that had bent lids from the weight of CRT monitors.

No, I don't have a Wang system although I do remember those Wang CP/M word processors being around in the early/mid 1980s

Definitely a different sort of classic machine this one. I wonder whether you perhaps have a Wang system as well.

Yes, I found a place you could buy the screen cable brand new on the web too!

Yes, apparently they did have an MS-DOS card available. A member of a mailing list I belong to told me that he and a friend even wrote BBS software and ran a BBS (in an MS-DOS environment) on an Epson fitted with this card. Now that's hardcore!

I've heard that Valdocs was very good, but also slow and buggy. Amazingly you can still download the QX-10 user's manual from Epson's web site!

Hi Earl, yes, and the keyboard is very good too. I would have enjoyed working on a machine like this in the early-mid 1980's. I do have some disk images of Valdocs. One of these days I'll have to get these on to floppies and take a good look to see what all the fuss (both positive and negative) was about (-:

Thanks! Still a long way to go until the whole collection is done so there are a few more to come yet. (-:

You're welcome! (-:

Yes, there is something in that statement. Give that retrobrite isn't a permanent solution I am more tolerant of the condition nowadays.

Glad you're enjoying them (-:

Thanks. I've got about 50 or so. Most of them are displayed in the collection section of my website. I'm gradually working through these to get them on video.

Excellent as always. I do enjoy watching these classic computer vids :)

Excellent as always, Tezza!

What a great way to start the day, another classic computer video.