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
@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.
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.
@BritishTechGuru@cstross@keyboards When I first came across Mr Sugar in the late 70s (Amstrad was based in E London then - Walthamstow? Ilford? - before moving to Shoeburyness), he was definitely an over-ambitious barrowboy.
Nothing much changed over 40+ years...
@BritishTechGuru@chrisdrake@keyboards Actually, for all that Sugar's goods were cheap and low spec, they DID fill a valuable niche. If you wanted an entry-level music centre (turntable/fm radio/cassette/stereo speakers) in the late 70s/early 80s, his were the cheapest. If you wanted an entry-level all-in-one business computer in the mid-80s, the PCW was the best value for money out there. And so on.
@BritishTechGuru@chrisdrake@keyboards If you wanted decent quality gear you bought Japanese, or Apple, or Compaq, or whatever. But Amstrad pioneered the niche of I-got-it-cheap-on-Ali-Express before the Chinese tech boom was on the horizon.
(I think he burned out/lost interest in the late 80s/early 90s, having made enough money for one lifetime. So he became a TV reality show parody boss on "The Apprentice" and bought his own legend, only without the Tangerine Shitgibbon's corruption.)
@cstross@keyboards On the other hand, the number of people who say they used one of those things would seem to indicate that they sold well enough...
(And it's still amazing now to remember that it was only two years from the Spectrum to the Mac, and another two years from that to the Archimedes. The pace of change was just ridiculous.)
@darkling@keyboards Again, the Spectrum was a late-to-the-game consumer machine, mass produced and cheap. A better comparison is the gap between the Apple II and the Mac (1977 to 1984).
@cstross@keyboards I think I remember our own first Amstrad - our first home computer! Despite its many limitations, it was a functioning workhorse for the guts of 5 years, before we "graduated" to something Microsoft.
@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.
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.
@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.
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@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!)
@cstross IIRC, 16-bit machines were a premium item until the end of the 80s (the high price of RAM was undoubtedly a part of that—the changing economics of RAM explain a lot of changes—though I imagine a 68000 would have gone for a lot more than a Z80 or 6502), so 8-bit machines persisted as a budget option. When the west moved on, the iron curtain fell and western 8-bit machines enjoyed a brief renaissance in the former communist bloc before PC clones conquered everything.
@jimbob The only reason I didn't buy a CPC6128 was because I'd just bought a very shiny smart typewriter and the PCW was being trailed in the trade press. A year later I sold the typewriter and bought a PCW, and that was that.
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