Storm Fox
Trying the find the next noun to verb
Getting thread from Wasting you Bandwidth where Sasaferrato souljacker fishfinger may be interested.
PCW and PCs made by Amstrad.
- Thread starter Storm Fox
- Start date
Steel Icarus
we move
I had a BBC Micro which I learned to program, it had less memory than a ZX Speccy but in my school nerd circle it was understood the Speccy was better for games and the Beeb was better to write stuff with.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
After a BBC B my dad did get Amstrad PCs - I can't remember the exact model numbers, one was a 1640? Came with DOS and GEM and I could buy shareware games from a paper catalogue that got posted to me on floppy discs.
souljacker
innit
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
I have to say that no PC ever got me interested in programming in the way that the BBC B (and the Archimedes) did. I literally wrote mouse-driven RPG design programs on the Archimedes. Once the PC arrived it just didn't seem to let me do anything.
Storm Fox
Trying the find the next noun to verb
My point is that the PCW was totally shit and made by Amstrad, in argument of your defence of Lord Sugar. I did miss that the Amstrad PC was different from the PCW. But you also have the Em@ilers that were pretty poor too.
I lot of Amstrad products are poorly made and poorly thought through.
I lot of Amstrad products are poorly made and poorly thought through.
FridgeMagnet
Administrator
The Amstrad PCs were toilet, shitty build quality, but they were cheap enough for a civilian to afford, just about. They were still at the high end of consumer purchases - my dad was (and is) a bit of a sci-fi and tech nut so was prepared to spend money on that sort of stuff.
I had a Sinclaire Spectrum 48K, (the one with the rubber keys.)
I even tried using a Light Pen with it.
I mean it worked but the screen flickered as you drew free hand and it didn't have enough processing power to show you the whole line you were drawing until you stopped. And you have a vast pallet of 8 colours of course.
A few years later, I wanted to upgrade to a Sam Coupe(A whatnow ,) I'd read about in Your Sinclair. I wasn't getting that but a few more years later did get an Amiga 500.
We had boring Nimbus MSDos PC clones at secondary school.
I even tried using a Light Pen with it.
I mean it worked but the screen flickered as you drew free hand and it didn't have enough processing power to show you the whole line you were drawing until you stopped. And you have a vast pallet of 8 colours of course.
A few years later, I wanted to upgrade to a Sam Coupe(A whatnow ,) I'd read about in Your Sinclair. I wasn't getting that but a few more years later did get an Amiga 500.
We had boring Nimbus MSDos PC clones at secondary school.
My mate had one. I used to sarcastically call them Green Screen Dream machines.
And Amiga vs Atari St arguments obv.
Buddy Bradley
Pantheistic solipsist
I had both - started out with a ZX81, then got a Spectrum 48K+ and then a SAM Coupe (which was actually pretty decent and I learned a lot about programming on).
I actually bought a 2nd-hand refurbished Spectrum+ recently off eBay, plus a thing to let me load games off an SD card instead of a tape player. Planning to see if I can teach myself some more advanced programming stuff now I have 35 more years experience coding.
Storm Fox
Trying the find the next noun to verb
You can get a Raspberry Pi for that price today. But £39.95 adjusted for inflation from 1978 is £234. Or going the other way a Raspberry Pi would cost £6.92When I was a nipper I desperately wanted to buy one of these but couldn't afford it
256 bytes of RAM for goodness sake!!
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
I started on a BBC B at school, with a 5 1/2" floppy. It's what started my love affair with ones and zeroes. Then I bought a ZX81, with a 16k RAM expansion that you daren't fart near for fear of the tremor causing a crash. Next I bought a Spectrum, which I wrote a monster/maze type game on, and got it published in one of the computer magazines where it won first place in a programming competition... Then I discovered girls and beer.
Lurdan
old wave
First computer I owned was an Amstrad PCW in '86 or '87. Later used one at work for several years running dbase II and supercalc. Can't say I have any nostalgia for them but they did what they claimed to, unlike some of the other shit Amstrad knocked out. Had one of their video recorders once - now that really was fucking garbage.
Saul Goodman
It's all good, man
Everything they made was utter garbage. Every. Single. Thing. They were the Ratners of electronics, but worse.
Lurdan
old wave
Don't disagree with that at all.
However in the late 80s and for a very short while afterwards (I stress that time period), for cheap word processing, and for very small business use, the PCW was at a price point which IBM and it's competitors weren't remotely interested in matching. And as I said, it worked. I'd used Commodore PETs before - it was significantly more usable at a fraction of the price.
The PCW's optional (and fucking noisy) daisy-wheel printer produced better quality output than the standard 'entry level' dot matrix printers for PCs. Bolt the optional serial interface and a modem onto the PCW and you could send and receives faxes saving the cost of a separate fax machine. The built-in word processing software was adequate. dbase II was a good database for it's time. Supercalc wasn't the greatest spreadsheet, but it pissed on the earliest versions of Excel. There were also disadvantages of course, starting with the non-standard 3" floppy discs. And compared to what became affordably possible a few years later (running more than one programme at a time!!) it was nothing.
Now I've no desire to defend that cunt Sugar and his works. I suspect the PCW was some sort of accident. Had he realised he was producing more than just a 'mugs eyeful', as he eloquently described his business strategy, he'd probably have tried further cost cutting and screwed it. On this occasion, and within the parameters I've indicated, he somehow failed to do so.
Storm Fox
Trying the find the next noun to verb
The thing that pissed me off most was a cost and unreliability of the 3" disk. I lost a few school assignment due to that.
existentialist
Tired and unemotional
At least you had that excuse. We didn't even have a dog. I was reduced to the far less exculpatory excuse of "I forgot".
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