The Thomson TO7 (also branded as the Thomson 9000) was produced by Thomson SA of France. It was released in 1982 for the price of 3750 French Franks. The computer is using the 8-bit Motorola 6809 CPU running at 1MHz and came with 22kByte of RAM and a cartridge system called MEMO7.

The capabilities were decent for the time, but nothing spectacular. The graphics were produced by a Motorola MCA1300 Gate Array, and produced 320x200 pixels in 8 colors. There was a limitation however that only 2 colors could be used for each row of 8 pixels, causing the infamous "color spill" for graphics. Computers such as the MSX1 and the Spectrum also suffered from this.

The TO reange of computers belonged to the first generation of home computers. The TO stands for tele-ordinateur. The computer could be connected to a regular television set via a SCART plug. The TO-7 was soon to be upgraded to the TO-7/70 which was chosen to be part of the French government education plan named "Computers for All" to support the development of programming skills in the education system.

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.