Amstrad PCW

~ the eulogy ~

Alan Sugar had noticed something the computer industry kept refusing to notice, which was that most home computers in Britain were being used to type. Not to program, not to play games. To type. In february 1985 he was in Akihabara looking at a strange electronic typewriter, and on the flight from Tokyo to Hong Kong he drew the outline of a replacement for it on the back of an airline napkin. The specification was mostly a price.

What shipped in september 1985 was the PCW 8256 at £399. Everything except the printer lived inside the monitor case, including the power supply the printer ran from, so the buyer plugged in one mains lead and had a working system. Inside it was a Z80 at 4MHz running CP/M Plus, and on the disk was LocoScript, a word processor written by Locomotive Software that hid the operating system so completely that most owners never learned there was one. Amstrad sold it through Dixons and advertised it with trucks tipping typewriters onto a scrap heap.

It worked. Seven hundred thousand went out in Britain in the first two years and eight million across the series before it ended, which held the record for the best selling British computer until the Raspberry Pi took it in 2016. Germany got it as the Joyce, licensed to Schneider and named after Sugar's secretary. Amstrad turned that credibility into an IBM-compatible line, and in april 1986 bought Sinclair Research's computer business outright.

This category never existed in Turkey and I think the reason is that the thing it replaced held on longer here. The daktilo stayed in offices through the nineties, and when it finally went, it did not go to an appliance with a printer bolted on. It went straight to a PC running a Turkish word processor, because by the time the money was there the PC was already the only answer anyone was selling. So the whole idea of a computer designed to look like it was not one, sold to people frightened of computers, is something I have only ever read about.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

Reviewers at the time were confused by it, and the American press more than most. Popular Science looked at the 3-inch disks and the aging CP/M and said the software range would never grow past spreadsheets and typing tutors, which was correct and beside the point. The PCW was not competing with computers. It was competing with the Magnavox VideoWriter and the Smith Corona word processors, and against those it was absurdly cheap for what it did.

Underneath the appliance, though, it was a real CP/M machine, and a lot of people found that out. Mallard BASIC and Dr. Logo were in the box. A serious catalog of office software arrived, followed by games and by bolt-on graphics interfaces Amstrad had never marketed. Buyers who had been sold a typewriter kept discovering they had bought a computer, which is the opposite of how that usually goes.

~ the next chapter ~

The series ran to six models over thirteen years and the last two are where it comes apart. The PCW 9256 in 1991 moved to 3.5-inch disks. Then in 1995 came the PcW16, which threw away the printer and every piece of PCW software ever written in favor of a custom graphical operating system, and did it in a market where a Windows PC cost less every quarter. It sold badly and the line was withdrawn in 1998.

Amstrad had already won the argument it started. The claim that a computer could be a household appliance sold at an appliance price is now so ordinary that it is hard to see it as a claim, and in 1985 it was contested by everybody. The PCW made that case eight million times and then died of it, because once the general-purpose machine got cheap enough, nobody needed a special one for typing.

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