Charlie Stross
I remember when I first saw a CPC464 in a shop I was working in, in 1984.
It was a very neat answer to what the market needed in 1982. But by 1984, cassette storage and Z80s were clearly long in the tooth—it came out the same year as the Macintosh, and 12 months late Atari STs and Amigas were showing up.
https://mastodon.social/@keyboards/112351091848131466
Charlie Stross
@electropict @sdarlington @keyboards Yup, the PCW left me in ZERO doubt that Van Eck phreaking was possible! (Get a B&W TV set with a portable antenna and point it at the PCW at short range and you could—very fuzzily—pick up the screen!)
Electropict
@cstross @sdarlington @keyboards
And multiple programming languages were available. You could draw and print the Mandelbrot set on them, if you had half a day or so spare.
They were great, for the time. As long as no-one wanted to use a TV or radio nearby at the same time. Shielded they were not, and the mice cables packed a punch across the spectrum. Which is how I became a creature of the night. 😉
Electropict
@sdarlington @cstross @keyboards
It also had the advantage of a cheap expansion port which allowed third parties to produce add-on packs for mice, extra RAM and graphics capabilities, coprocessors, hard drive connectors and I don’t know what else. Well before these things were affordable on IBM clones. And it was easy to hack physically, hence mine had a DD 3·5″ drive within a year.
Charlie Stross
@electropict @sdarlington @keyboards I bought an original 8256 the month it came out. By the time I sold it and switched to a PC it had 512Kb of RAM,a second (720K) 3" floppy drive, an external 10Mb hard disk, and was spending all its time running CP/M.
Stephen Darlington
@cstross @keyboards I think the PCW was a better example of what Amstrad was aiming for: the non-technical audience, everything you need in the box. To your point, the advantage the PCW had was that word-processing didn't advance as quickly as home computers.
Charlie Stross
@keyboards On the "what the 1982 market demanded, only in 1984" note, Amstrad was a consumer electronics firm and Alan Sugar was not a computer guy—he hired the design talent in and bought the components obsolescent hence cheap (eg. his giant bulk buy of Sony's also-ran 3" floppy disks and drives—he bought their entire manufacturing run when it failed to out-compete the rival 3.5" standard). I think he lacked a feel for the pace of change in computing, which was much faster than in TV/audio.
Zephod Beeblebrox
Alan Sugar registered Amstrad as a trademark when he was a teen. It stood for Alan Michael Sugar Trading. He was a trader rather than an IT person and he saw the market blossom for home computers, jumped on the bandwagon and came out with decent enough stuff. The 3" drive however, was what really killed the CPM operating system. Nobody wanted an expensive non-standard floppy.
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