Amstrad Actiomp
...every month. K comes out overy third Thursday of the month and is produced by those wondorful people at Future Publishing.
MAG*
My address.
1 984 - the year Frankie Goes to Hollywood spent three months at number one, George Orwell's prophecy didn't come true and Amstrad launched a very long computer. AA longest-running editor. Rod Lawton,
April 11th 1984 - something happened that was to change the world lor ever. Allegedly. Alan Sugar launched the CPC464. It was a vision of the future. The world had never seen anything like it before (or Alan Sugar's oarnet. either). It was a computer that came complete with - gasp - a proper monitpr. And it had a built-in tape drive And it was colour. And it had a huge 64K of memory. And it had holes lor printers and joysticks and all sorts of other, as yet ummagined. goodies.
Okay, it was built like a plastic outhouse and had a keyboard from hell, but there was no doubting its technical ability and its wonderful all-irvoneness. It wasn't up against much, of course. The Commodore 64 looked like a keyboard pumped up to the wrong pressure, and the Spectrum had the ergonomics of a pre-war Skoda. By contrast, the 464 was a miracle o' engineering, the pinnacle of technology and the one ^fcp. machine you could ^V buy with a keyboard that was wider than your house.
The thing about the CPC, though, was that it was a serious tod, as well as a games machine. Nowadays, you can pick up a PC for the Rod Lawton - he'. »on P"<* a case °f some change! In hit »In.«. brown ale and a
•H wore all luidi round Chinese takeaway. Thank you Red. but back then PCs were for corporate men in suits, whose departmental budgets were the size of the average person's mortgage. The ordinary punter couldn't afford both a house and a PC, so the arrival of the CPC was a breakthrough m home computing. It wasn't |ust a games machine. You could also program it using the
oult-n BASIC And publishers started producing sore quite good, senous software for the machne You really could set ud and run your owr bus ness us-ng a CPC (yo.'d orobably gc b'oke, o' course, b-t you could do it).
The next big thing
But the 464 wasn't pe-fect. Tape-based software might be cheap to manufacture, but fs not hugely reliable, and it's slower than a sedated stegosaurus to loao A-strad 'esponded in May 1995 wit- the CPC664 - a 464 wit* a d'Sx drive and a keyboard tia! ddr't look :ike it was made of Lego1". St;H, only 64K o' merrcy, though...
That memory imitation spet the end of the 664 just si* "icnths later. In August 1985, Arrstrad confirmed that it was deader than the dodo, and was to be replaced by a new machine - the 6128. This had - gasp - a disk drive and 128K of memory.
Autumn 1985 was an exciting time. You could buy Protext or tape, diSK or ROM and Technician Ted scored 82 per cent in Amstrad Action (that was at a time when getting two pixels to move simultaneously in the same direction was considered an achievement).
Showbusiness
By 1985 you actually had whole shows devoted to Amstrads! The autumn 85 event took place at London's Novotel. Sadly, though, there weren't too many games softies there. And, er, Amstrad didn't have a stand there either. Guess they were showing their level of support for the machine right from the start, then?
Never mind - the CPC was getting loads of support from the games industry. In particular, one David Braben. author of the formidable Elite. Yes. the blockbusting Elite appeared that winter -the game many reckon to be the finest ever written. A game where you can spend months and roa-ning ^DF through a universe populated by hostile wire-frame polygons and diffe'ently-cooured discs. Elite fans tell me it's a g'eat game once you get into it. I tell them I'd have more luck getting into a phone box with Cyrii Smth.
Antiques Roadshow
TeH you what, though Why don't they write games like Spirxtoy any more? More rooms than Buckingham Palace and harder than eating fned rice with chopsticks. Most peoole wouldn't live long enough to finish this game. If you bought this one in the spring of 1986 you're probably still playing it now.
Tell you something else that came out at the same time - Mini Office 2. This formidable suite of programs cost only £20. and included a word processor, a database, a spreadsheet, graphics capabilities, comms stuff, label printing facilities... and bugs. At least, the pre-pro version reviewed by AA did. But whata classic program. Look at how many CPC owners still use it. Quite.
In fact lots of things have gone the same way as Mini Office 2, haven't they? How many of you remember the Gra/safes Gratpad II graphics tablet? Or what about the Votex ITX2000A teletext adaptor? And how about the old Protek 1200 'acoustic coupler'? These were the days when home computers were the future', when your micro could act as the nerve centre of your entire life. When you could turn your CPC into a teetering edifice, consisting entirely of loose cables, wobbly connectors and little black boxes that creaked if you squeezed them too hard.
Talking of creaky little black boxes, it was about this time (mid-1986) that Alan Sugar bought the littlest and creakiest of them all - the Spectrum. In fact, he bought out Sinclair. What an inspired move. Invent a computer better than your competitor's, then buy your competitor's. I never
Post a comment