In 1977 Harry Fox and Oscar Jutzeler (former Swiss clock and watch makers) put up a company named SpectraVision to distribute computer gaming products. The first products included cartridges for the popular consoles Atari VCS2600 and Colecovision and even some for the Commodore VIC-20.
In the early 80's the company was renamed to Spectravideo, due to a name conflict with a company making cable TV products. Later on they started selling accessories like the popular Quickshot joystick series. The first computer by Spectravideo was the SVI 318 which was not a big success so Kazuhiko Nishi, the head of ASCII Microsoft Japan, was asked to help the company with the design of their next model. Nishi agreed to help them, on the condition that he could base his MSX standard on the SVI design he would create. The result was the SVI 328 (which was my first real computer, *sob* ).
The SVI 328 was very close to the MSX standard, but Spectravideo launched SVI 728 in 1984 to make a fully compatible version. The following year they released the SVI 738 which included advanced features like a built-in 3.5" disk drive.
The following computers were SVI 838 (also known as X'press 16) - a hybrid of a IBM PC combatible and an MSX2, and the more standard PC's SVI 256 and SVI 640. For a brief moment in time, Spectravideo claimed a monopoly on MS-DOS computers in the US, but after shipping almost 25,000 computers the company went down and was subsumed by its manufacturer, Bondwell.
Spectravideo still exists in the UK but now sells most of its products under the brand name of Logic 3. Quickshot was sold out by Bondwell some years ago to Tomei International (Holding) Ltd. in Hong Kong.
Information was gathered using the links from www.homecomputer.de .