It used to produce 8-bit home computers in the 80's though sub-companies : '''SIMMIV''' (Société Internationale de Micro-Informatique et de Vidéo) also known as '''Thomson Micro.''' (1983-1989)
Despite those machines were When the Amstrad arrived they literally whipped them out by Amstrad in of the French market, they remains remain a well known fail in France, and is are still quite beloved in this country by those who knew them at school.
As we say : '''Proudly Merde in France.'''
The Thomson 8bit computers are '''6809E CPU based (1mhz)'''
They were released in a lot of models variations (mostly concerning the keyboard or colour of the casing) from late1982late 1982-1983 to 1989.
While MO and TO models are incompatible in software, most of the peripherals and Hardware were compatible.
2nd generation was almost fully retro-compatible with 1st generation but specific 2nd generation softwares software couldn't run on 1st generation computers.
Those compatibilities issues were fatal to the range alongside the success of the Amstrad CPC in France.
As a result, peoples were shy and reluctant to get into this because those computers were not the best for the same price on the market, to begin with, and because it is always a shame to see that if you waited a bit more, you would have had a far better product.
Amstrad customers had this with the CPC664(with the Amstrad the CPC6128 was released only a few months later than the CPC664, having more memory for similar price).
A typical example is the TO9, which was supplied with no Monitor first, then was supplied with a colour monitor for the exact same price a 4-6 months later.
And with a lot of additional stuff 1 year after being first released (TO9+...). And TO9 keyboard was no more compatible with TO9+...
*'''TO7''' : produced from 1982 to 1984. Supplied with only 24K RAM (16K used by the video)... so actually 8K usable, upgradable into 48K (so actually 32k because of the 16k video). It can display only 8 colours. Probably the worst keyboard ever.
* '''TO7/70''' : in 1984, this one replaced the "faulty" TO7.