MSX was a standardized range of Z80 based 8 bit computers developped by Microsoft and various (mostly) japanese producers to exploit... microsoft softwares.
MSX stands for "Machines with Software eXchangeability".
Despite having the colour attributes logic, it wasn't as bad as on the [[ZX Spectrum|Speccy]]. Yet as a Z80 based computer, many European Sofware developpers did those awfull scrappy speccy ports, which Japanese couldn't understand ("why do they have so scrappy graphics ?")
Latter MSX standard included extra video modes without the colours clashes.
[http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX Wikipedia page]