Amstrad CPC

~ the obituary ~

Amstrad sold cheap hi-fi before it sold computers. Alan Michael Sugar Trading had spent a decade working out how to build stack systems that looked like the expensive ones and cost a third as much, and when Sugar turned that eye on the home computer in 1983 he came back with a commercial observation rather than a technical one. Anybody buying a Spectrum or a Commodore 64 had to find a television to plug it into, and the television was in the room where the family was. So sell the screen with the computer, in the same carton, at a price that still undercut the fight.

The CPC464 went on sale in june 1984 with a Z80A at 4 MHz and 64K of memory, its cassette drive built into the keyboard housing, at £249 with a green monitor or £359 with a color one. The monitor carried the power supply, which is why the arrangement was cheaper than it sounds: there was only one transformer between the two halves of the product. A disk model followed in 1985, the CPC664, which Amstrad replaced within months with the 6128 and its 128K, annoying everyone who had just bought the 664.

Where it worked was not where it was designed. Britain took it, but France took it harder, and Spain and the german-speaking market between them accounted for a large share of the roughly three million machines. In Germany it was sold by Schneider with a different badge on the same hardware. Amstrad bought Sinclair's computer business in 1986 and spent the second half of the decade selling PC clones on the same logic it had used on hi-fi, which is what eventually made the CPC surplus to its own maker.

I never saw one in Turkey, and the machines that did arrive here came in pieces. The culture that grew around them was the exact inverse of what Sugar was selling: by the early 2000s I was keeping a hardware list in my forum signature on frmtr, because the components were the identity and the box around them was nothing. A CPC owner had nothing to list. The entire product was one line long, and that was the argument for it, aimed at a household that wanted a computer and did not want a project. The hobby press never took that customer seriously and that customer turned out to be most of the market.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

France is the part of the story that gets lost in the British telling. The CPC arrived there with a distribution deal and a software scene that produced its own magazines and its own games, and for a stretch of the mid-eighties it was the default machine in French bedrooms in a way it never quite was in British ones. Spain went the same way, helped by a price that undercut the imported alternatives.

The software base grew accordingly. Amstrad Action ran in Britain from 1985 and lasted until 1995, well past the machine's commercial life, and the French and Spanish press ran their own equivalents. A demo scene formed and is still active in 2026, which for a machine discontinued thirty six years ago is a decent measure of what people actually thought of it.

~ the funny part ~

Amstrad committed to a three-inch floppy disk, a format Hitachi made and almost nobody else adopted, and stuck with it long enough that the media became expensive and hard to find while the machines were still being sold. Owners bodged five and a quarter inch drives onto the side rather than pay for the official media. It was the one place where Sugar's instinct for the cheapest available part produced the most expensive possible outcome.

The end was the GX4000, a games console released in september 1990 that was a CPC with the keyboard removed and cartridges added, launched into a Christmas that belonged to Sega and Nintendo. It was discontinued inside a year. The 464plus and 6128plus that shipped alongside it were the last CPCs, and the line stopped in 1990. Amstrad went on selling PC clones and then satellite hardware for the rest of its independent life, until Sky bought the company in 2007.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »