The Thomson MO5 came to the market the same time as the TO7/70. Both computers were successors of the TO-7, with the MO5 lower in price and quallity. The keyboard was made up of gummi keys like the ZX spectrum while the TO7/70 had full stroke keys. The MO5 was marketed for home use, and the TO7/70 was part of the French governments educational push. This way students could work on the TO7/70 at school, and if parents wanted they could get the MO5 as a cheaper version for their kids to practice computer skills at home.

Memory of the MO5 was half of that of the TO7/70, but it had the same CPU and graphics capabilities as it's bigger brother.

The Motorola 6809 is an 8-bit microprocessor with some 16-bit features. It was designed by Motorola's Terry Ritter and Joel Boney and introduced in 1978. Although source compatible with the earlier Motorola 6800, the 6809 offered significant improvements over it and 8-bit contemporaries like the MOS Technology 6502, including a hardware multiplication instruction, 16-bit arithmetic, system and user stack registers allowing re-entrant code, improved interrupts, position-independent code and an orthogonal instruction set architecture with a comprehensive set of addressing modes.