Originally a manufacturer of memory add-ons for Sinclair machines, Memotech developed their own competing computer when it was perceived the expansion pack business would no longer be viable.

The MTX was selling into a highly competitive space, with the much cheaper Sinclair ZX Spectrum finding favour with home users, the BBC Micro conquering the education market and the IBM PC making inroads into becoming a standard for business.

The prospect of a very large contract with the Soviet Union was on the horizon by 1985 and a Russian version of the machine was designed, complete with a bright red case.

The company was subsequently relaunched and the final version of the machine was the MTX512 Series 2 released in 1986, produced mainly as a way of using up stocks of parts before the business moved on to other ventures.

[4] The MTX512 (together with the FDX floppy drive peripheral) is remembered for an appearance in the 1985 comedy movie Weird Science where it had a central role in the plot, being used to conjure the character Lisa played by Kelly LeBrock.

All machines had a Zilog Z80A CPU running at 4 MHz[1] which could only address a maximum of 64KB at any one time, larger amounts of RAM were accessed through bank switching.

This was a distinctive feature as many competing home computers of the time used a cost-reduced chiclet, membrane or rubber keyboard that was difficult to type on.

[10] An MTX variant of the BASIC language interpreter was supplied on ROM as standard, which was a user expectation in the mid 80s for a home computer.

A novel proprietary programming language called MTX Noddy was available in ROM that was a card based information retrieval system somewhat similar in concept to HyperCard.

[8] A set of cards can be filled with arbitrary information using an integrated text editor (the user can type anywhere on the screen) and then saved for later retrieval by name.

A simplified Noddy programming language aimed at novices allows the cards to be linked together with logic steps based on if/else statements.

The device could be used with any of the machines in the range but at least 64 KB of RAM was needed, necessitating an upgrade for the Memotech 500 model, and required the optional communications board to which it attached with a ribbon cable.

[12] An optional colour 80 column x 24 row video card could also be added to the FDX unit, a display mode which was often perceived as important for running popular business software such as WordStar and SuperCalc, but was not natively supported by the MTX system.

A variant of the FDX called the HDX was produced, that was sold with a 5 - 20 MB hard disk combined with a single 5.25" floppy drive.

The attached MTX computer delivered image manipulation features such as scale, rotate, blur, sharpen, edge detection and contrast adjustment.