whoa! we are not worthy (to be entered as a comment below the legendary techmoan) The only observation from an otherwise excellent video is the reference to the French head of amstrad falling pregnant at an [unfortunate] time. Shows Sugar's rather medieval attitudes which wouldn't have been out of place in those days but are now, as I think he's had similar "problems" with staff / colleagues in more contemporary times. still, really really excellent historical context - thank you NN.
I'm not from the U.K., and everything I know about the British micro wars has been learned through TH-cam videos. Still, it seems clear to me that Clive Sinclair was extraordinary in the sense that his main goal was to benefit society. It doesn't make him the best businessman, but it does make him an admirable human being.
@Brittania Saying it wasn't a force in the Uk is kind of deceiving. I bought a NES on a trip in the UK in a store full of NES games etc. It was still a force, just not the only name in the mind.
@Brittania Not "as" popular isn't the same as not popular. The NES had a solid ground here in the UK, but it wasn't as big as the Micros or the 16-Bit home computers.
My first ever computer was an Amstrad CPC464, I was late to the party with it but hey it got me into programming at a very young age, making a computer do what I want? Amazing! 18 years or so later and here I am as a Software Developer, I'll always have a real soft spot for the CPC464 for that reason
Also same. Xmas 1991 we got one. It was handed down form my sisters to me in 1992 and I loved it but, hated loading games on tape being a huge hit or miss if they'll work.
great video as usual.. loved my time at amstrad in the 90s. defo the best days of my working life.. early morning and late night sessions on doom over the company network what a blast!!
Thank you for such a comprehensive history of the CPC family and the ecosystem in which it developed. I lived the microcomputer explosion of the 80´s in Spain. I played with friends´Spectrums and finally purchased a second hand Amstrad PCW512 as my first computer. Fond memories!
Yes, my 'first computer' ! It was a CPC464 with a 'green screen', but my dad and I 'upgraded' it to a CPC6128. I will never sell this fantastic piece of 8bit history ;-) So much fun I had with this machine, I think it gave me the real kickstart to learn programming.. Really enjoyed this video, keep up the good work!
My first real job was selling Amstrad PCs in Western Australia, back in '89 or '90. I still have a letter from Amstrad congratulating me on the highest number of sales in a single month right across Australia ;-)
fantastic content you're making here. I wish I could find documentaries more often of this kind of quality. Honestly I am blown away by the storytelling and information dense style.
AAHhh! The Amstrad CPC6128 ! My first computer back in '87 my eternal love affair 'till today. The 6128 model was especially popular also in Greece where i live (besides France and Spain of course) and Italy and Germany too. It introduced many people to programing (and gaming of course). I can't ever forget the endless fights and arguments with C64 owners (which was another incredible 8bit machine - i must admit) over which had the best games... and the endless winter hours playing head over heels, Pirates, Elite, Prince of Persia and hundreds of other great games with my brother and friends! 80's ruled !! PS. Thank you for the memories and all the great info, Great job at finding all this, so the older can remember and the younger ones learn the History of Computers !
I was one of the few German Speccy users, before I switched to a C64, but always interisted in all the other 8-bit Systems. This documentary was really well made and I enjoyed it very much. Thanks!
I taught computing in the late 80's and early 90's using the IBM compatible Amstrad PC1512 it was a great machine for teaching and it had the GEM software over the DOS which the students loved.
I love how Sugar went from cheap tat audio to cheaper but better computers to cheap old tech in cheap new forms. I don't personally like the man, but can't deny his business acumen made a big difference in the computer scene in the UK and Europe. Sinclair tried to build down to a price, but Sugar was all "For a few quid more, we can do a LOT better." Well played, sir, very well played.
This has been my favorite story you have done so far. I feel like if I was alive in the 80s with any sort of buying power, I would have thrown in with Amstrad. I like their business model and the way they designed their computers.
The 464 was our first computer in 1988 I believe. My older sister had got it for school and I spent so many hours from the age of 5 playing Harrier Attack. Years later and now a software developer and still loving the 464.
Because of your channel I've watched Micro Men and learned so much of the UK computer scene through your stories, videos and sometime silly dialog. Keep up the good work! I'm enjoying it. You're like the UK version of LGR, which is a meant to be a compliment.
Man, the Plus range was bloody impressive for 8 bit technology. The technical improvements really pushed it to a new level, it looks and sounds more like 12 bit or something like that. Crazy good.
Yes, 12 bit architectures do exist, as well as 18 bit, 36 bit and even more esoteric ones besides including 14-bit. There's no law saying they have to be powers of 2, and in fact for the longest time multiples of 6 were more favoured as they were more flexible for packing multiple characters of different lengths within a single memory word. It's just that nowadays we have instead standardised mainly on multiples of the 8-bit byte, particularly direct powers of 2, for various reasons. Largely IBM, Intel, the use of computers for accounting and other financial control, the blurring of the lines between computers and calculators as a result can all be thanked for that. If the well known ASCII alphanumeric coding had become the earliest dominant influential force in the saving of textual information in digital files, we might these days be using even odder multiple-of-7 systems, because ASCII started out as a 7-bit representation (expanded from the 6-bit FIELDATA representation which only had room for capitals, numbers and a few punctuations marks, itself derived from 5-bit baudot / teletype / telegram / paper tickertape encoding which had to switch between two different character sets to provide both letters and numbers/symbols and ended up being used with computers because the equipment already existed and was convenient to interface for use as a combined printer and input terminal...) and only later expanded into the now widely used 8-bit Extended ASCII (having been further extended to 9 bits in some places along the way, an augmentation whose loss pretty much prompted the development of Unicode because 256 chars just aren't enough for a lot of languages and other uses)... and, well, why waste money storing an entire bit that's completely blank? But, IBM were the market leader in that type of computer for the longest time, and their preferred character encoding, developed in the mid-1960s, was a much reviled little horror called EBCDIC... which although it often didn't offer even as many different characters as ASCII, still employed an 8-bit encoding in order to be extensible and to keep numbers, capital letters, lower case letters, punctuation marks, special symbols, control codes etc each parcelled up into their own distinct, modular, hard to confuse subranges, a bit like modern UTF-16 or -32. The 8-bit character was a useful midway point in the spread of power-of-two bit parcels, being useful for rich-text encoding, fitting two, three or four neatly into a 16, 24 (which was a thing for a short while) or 32 bit word memory structure, and itself being dividable into 4-bit nibbles, or binary coded decimal digits (the BCD of EBCDIC) that could represent financial data with absolute quantised accuracy across a 0000... to 9999.... range with no worries about strange floating point rounding effects or rollovers happening at some weird binary value, and pack in 4, 6 or 8 digits to a single memory word. Or the even smaller 2-bit "crumb" (or, ugh... "tayste"), and then of course the single-bit flag. IBM's thing, after all, had always mainly been in calculating accounts and in tabulating things like census data, where you mainly deal with decimal representations with a certain limited precision (often you're not bothered about anything less than a cent / penny, or at the very most a hundredth of one) and a certain practical limit on the upper value that varies depending on whether you're running a corner shop or a global empire, but typically might demand a minimum of 8 digits of precision but certainly no more than 16, meaning 4-bit digits within a power-of-two (or possibly 12 / 20 / 24 bit) word length allow you to make the most efficient and economic use of the available storage whilst also being scrupulously accurate in your record keeping. And where IBM led, others followed, even if they weren't using the actual same character encoding style. As their machines went from being big mainframes that filled a whole floor, to smaller ones that filled a room, to large minis that fit along a single wall, they (and their main rivals, such as DEC's PDP minicomputer, that also used 8-bit characters, and a 16-bit word) became ever more pervasive in a number of smaller, everyday, often text-heavy roles, the influence of that decision spread, and the older multiple-of-6 word length standard became increasingly isolated to crusty, proprietary old dinosaur machines that were much more concerned with heavyweight floating-point scientific number crunching and other such things where absolute exact fixed-decimal-point precision wasn't as much of a concern and neither was the storage of very much text.
Intel come into the frame with the birth of the high-end desk calculator, which in the late 60s/early 70s were starting to incorporate some of the functions that had previously been the preserve of mainframe computers and professional accounts tabulating machines. They had been pioneers in the field of integrated circuits, including CPU precursor chips like discrete ALUs and register files, and various companies looking to make such semi programmable, interfaceable caculators (and even the occasional mainframe terminal) started contracting them to create suitable chipsets to condense the required circuitry down from several transistor-strewn boards to a single board with a few ICs on it. Not all of those contracts fully panned out; companies fold, or change their mind about what they want to make, or dislike what's presented, or have a cashflow problem etc, but then Intel is left with significant IP and R&D investment to try and monetise and get a return on their investment from. One such sour deal was for a calculator following what was known as the bit-slice model (other 4-bit examples of which co-contend for the "actual first identifiable CPU" crown), needing four particular components - a keypad and multi-segment fluorescent display driver, a ROM with a few hundred bytes of code, a RAM chip just about large enough to store all the working data for calculations and the user's "memory" space, and a 4-bit CPU to coordinate everything - that became the first four members of the MCS4, or 4xxx range... the 4001, 4002, 4003... and 4004. Someone at Intel realised that actually, within all that, especially if they tweaked the 4001 a bit to make it a general purpose I/O device, they had the rudiments of a full general purpose computer, contained entirely within a quartet of microchips that could be held in one hand, and that such a thing might be a highly valuable product to sell to anyone who wanted a basic-level computer or electronic control system but didn't want to go to the trouble and expense of buying or building a typical mini (which was still composed of multiple circuit boards with dozens of simple ICs and hundreds of discrete transistors, where the most complicated thing might be a 256-bit RAM chip, so heavy on the budget and the power bill), much less a mainframe. So, the MCS4 range, based around the i4004 was born, and the rest is history. From there it was a fairly natural extension, after a short and largely abortive foray into extending and streamlining the 4004 in the guise of the 4040, and turning it into a microcontroller (the 8041) by further integrating the CPU, ROM/RAM and I/O into a single chip, to extend the data bus width and operating word bit length to 8 bits, with the 8008 and then 8080 (which is the core architecture that still sits at the heart of the Z80 to this day, and which the 8086 is a direct descendant via the 8085). After all, the instructions and many processed data types even in the 4004 were already 8 bits anyway (it's just that BCDs were the main primitive focussed on by that originally calculator-derived design, working on a single pair of one-digit operands per machine cycle), simply transferred in and out of memory, and run through the internal ALU, in 4-bit slices. After which each successive step upwards has been a doubling, as the extended width is often accompanied by some new instructions that let you work on two of the previously largest individual words in a single memory transfer, which is much more convenient for immediately improving throughput than a 1.5x increase which means you can work on three, rather than two, of the second-largest old set of sizes. Other manufacturers got in on the CPU making game quite quickly after that of course, chiefly Motorola (with the 8-bit 6800 and its derivatives, then later the 16-bit 68000 which was strongly rumoured to be heavily based on the instruction sets from the PDP-8 and PDP-11 16-bit minis), and then Zilog and MOS who somewhat ripped off Intel and Moto then stole their market from under them by selling mostly-compatible processors. Some of their earliest attempts were 4-bit, but typically, seeing how Intel had rapidly moved to downplaying the 4004 and 4040 as not really useful for anything other than the embedded applications that would soon be shifted to the 8041 and its children, they got straight in at the door with 8-bit designs instead. After all, hardly any "serious" computers of the previous generation had buses even as small as 8-bit, let alone 4-bit; most were at least 12, if not 16 or larger, so why artificially bottleneck your architecture in comparison to those for the sake of just four extra legs on the package? The data bus took up relatively little space in those terms vs the address bus, anyway, if you wanted to be able to access any meaningful amount of memory (at least 4kwords, thus needing at least 12 bits of address), and indeed Intel, in the era when memory speeds were still far slower than even the quite low frequency early CPUs, took the space-saving step of multiplexing the data and address onto the same pins. Within a typical memory cycle there was plenty of time to assert first the target address (possibly even broken up into sequential assertion of row, then column, on successive ticks) on the shared bus, then either the data to be written, or wait for the read-out data to arrive on the same pins, without overloading the processor or spending any time waiting that you wouldn't have done anyway with fully separate buses... of course, that came back to haunt them with the 8086, when memory had got a lot faster and sending everything in and out on the same pins became a serious botteneck even with the full 16-bit version never mind the 8088, but it made a lot of sense at first and certainly aided the rapid production and takeup of second-gen 8-bit chips after the initial 4-bit generation proved there was a market for the taking. Even inamongst all that, by the way, there were a few CPUs with odd word lengths. I can't recall them off the top of my head, but if you do a bit of wikipedia trawling you'll certainly find some early game console and home computer CPUs - also-rans to a fault, pretty much establishing 8-bit as the way to go as a side effect - that have something other than 4, 8 or 16. There's definitely a 12 in there, and a 14 as well I think. Not sure about others. There might even be a real oddball like a 9 or 11... Thing is, it's actually address range that's more explicitly bounded by powers of two rather than bus width; ie, how many words you can store, rather than how long they are. Usually the former is determined by the physical properties of the individual memory chips in use, whilst the latter is a mix of other chip properties (whether they hold arrays of single bits, 2 bits, 4 bits etc) and more importantly how many chips are installed. You can quite happily, make a 5-bit width computer simply by using 1-bit chips installed in groups of 5 - but the number of 5-bit words will almost certainly be a power of 2 (if indeed not a power of 4), because the addressing limit of each chip's internal array is bounded by how many unique signal combinations can be placed on its address pins (if it has separate row and column pins then it can be an "odd" power of 2; if the same pins are shared for row then column, it'll be an even power of 2, ie a power of 4), and it makes the most sense (and is easier from a system building perspective) to provide the largest possible array internally for a given input address width.
Anyway, tl;dr sidenote - you could argue it _is_ sort of 12-bit in a way. The Plus palette is 4096 colours, formed from 16 levels (4 bits) each of Red, Green and Blue... possibly also the audio, the AY has 4-bit volume for each channel (meaning in simple terms that a sample replayed by setting a stationary wave on one channel then varying the volume can only have 4-bit resolution), and the DMA sample channel has 8-bit resolution... and probably a few other features besides :) The cherry would be finding that the graphical coprocessor is actually a 4-bit machine, then you could add it to the CPU...
@@markpenrice6253 Why did they not match the 8 MHz of the 16bit computers by using a Z80H ? Also a doubled VRAM speed would make those pixel less blocky ( new video mode ). And of course I want 1px = 1 byte graphics mode with paging.
14:00 - The odd thing about that 60% figure is that it doesn't gel with what I remember people using. Everyone I knew at school had Sinclair, Commodore and Acorn machines, with the occasional Dragon and Oric. I don't recall anyone who had an Amstrad. Is there any data on where in the UK the sales of the 464, etc. were concentrated? I was wondering if it was in specific regions. I don't remember the Plus range at all, certainly not any adverts for them either. 21:35 - INPUT magazine! Now that I do remember. :D Still have the full binder set. Great times with those mags.
I fitted out an I.T. room at school with 15 CPC 6128s and DMP 2000 printers. They functioned faultlessly and with software like Protext, Supercalc & Rembrandt offered a great introduction to Computing. I even sold them for a reasonable price after 5 years use.
I was lucky enough to get a 6128 when it came out. It definitely had great titles but another great feature was that it came with a Basic programming tutorial where you'd learn to program a phone book. Got me hooked.
My friend in Ireland had one of these color model CPC 464 in the 80's. We spent many hours playing games, and typing in code from the back pages of Amstrad Action magazine. A few years later I bought a green screen model of the CPC 464 - Great computers. My cousins had a 6128 that I thought was amazing because it had a disc drive! LOL
21:31 INPUT magazine… I still have all of mine!!! I still have my 6128 as well. I adapted quite a few programs from INPUT and saved them to 3” disks... I bought a 3.5” floppy drive for my 6128 so that I could archive my 3” disks. One 3.5” floppy could store the contents of two full 3” disks - 3” disks only held 178k per side. I named my 6128 (only time I ever named a computer) Madeline, in homage to Maddie Hayes (Moonlighting) and Madeline from Electric Dreams which was a favourite movie of mine from that time. Being a nerdy person, “Madeline” was an acronym for Microprocessor Accessed Data Entry Logical Input Number Equipment. I can’t believe I still remember that! I learned all of my skills on my 6128. Hacking as well as WP and Desktop Publishing. I had bought a DMP2000 (still have that too) and I turned out all sorts of stuff. All of my University assignments and projects were carried out on the 6128 and printer. I even purchased a ROM chip that allowed me to read and write to PC formatted (FAT12) floppy disks. I had originally made my own ROM board for two chips but later sprung the cash for a 6-socket ROM board. Then I went the PC way with an Olivetti Quaderno notebook (still have that too!) And then began the long descent into MS-DOS and Windows eventually leading to Apple. But my 6128 is still my first computer. Back when I was able to get a £400 loan from my bank and pay it off monthly with my part-time job in BHS… Apart from replacing the belts in the disk drive, the 6128 never needed any maintenance. Of course, if I was to set it up today, I’d like to check the state of the belts - it’s been about 15 years since it was last switched on and I’d like to check the capacitors in the monitor/PSU. Not too shabby for something that is 33 years old.
I loved my CPC6128, it got me though my Computer Studies GCSE as I wrote my final project on it, an Othello (Reversi) game you played against the computer.
Bloody brilliant video, loved part 1 and 2. You put a lot of effort and detail into each video you do 👍. Keep up the amazing work and can't wait till you next video 😎.
Another great video, Nostalgia Nerd. Great informative content presented in an exemplary way with excellent visual work. If you ever feel that it might not be worth all the time and effort in making these videos, I'd like to assure you that it is appreciated greatly.
Not often i comment on vids these days but i had to as a proud and happy 6128 owner. I remember the christmas i got it. I was a very lucky lad, even got the lightgun too! I remember my dad being smug about the fact "It's got a disk drive son, that'll be quicker than your mates, none of that tape rubbish". Oh how i lorded it over my C64 mates when their games failed to load. Sadly it did not do what my parents wanted it to do and somehow improve my maths and English. since i spent all the time playing games on it. But i remember my mum actually got some software for it for writing and doing accounting. Don't recall her ever using the dot matrix printer but i had to show her how to save onto disks bless her. I still felt like the odd one out owning one though, sadly me and my cousin who lived two doors down couldnt share games as he had the tape version. And yes its easy to see nowadays how dire some of the ports were. It was pretty much consigned to the loft the minute we got our Packard Hell in 95. That was a really fun bit of catching up though. It's still in the loft too.....
These look like nifty micros that as an American I was completely unaware of, nice mini documentary, thanks. BTW, those rapping crocodiles are pure nightmare fuel. Also BTW, congrats in following John Romero as a guest on "The Retro Hour".
This all happened during my formative years, but I was in the states and had no exposure to the UK micro-computing world. I was never able to fully appreciate Newton Pulsifer's background story until now.
That 464 Plus is a nice looking machine. I might have to look into the cost of importing some of these old British computers as they look like they'd be fun to mess with.
I didn't think I could take 2 spoonfuls of Suga in one go, but here I am back for Park 2. Great videos, well edited and put together. When I find a job I enjoy and is more than minimum wage I will become a Patron.
I used to play Barbarian and Bombjack on Amstrad CPC: insert the cassette tape, wait half an hour for the game to load then enjoy, in those days playing a video games was something you earned and enjoyed even on a tiny green and white screen!
Overlander... wow now there's a blast from the past, that was one of my favourite games on my 464 back in the day. I really should dig out my old tapes, there's so many games I never managed to complete, or completely misunderstood.
And the Amstrad Spectrum straight out of the starting blocks had a decent keyboard. Sir Clive never could get his head around the need for such a bloody obvious thing.
Fascinating, i never knew the plus range had extra hardware features, ive been educated :) My only real memories of Amstrad back in the day was being offered a 464 with colour monitor second hand (was still crazy like £150 for a second hand one at the time), my parents couldn't afford it but i phoned my best friend and his parents bought it for him. I was a bit jealous but seeing as we were best friends I could play on it almost whenever I wanted :D
A friend of mine had the Amstrad CPC 464+ with that Burning Rubber game. Felt a little outdated even then cos we were all moving onto Amigas and Mega Drives. Never realised quite how many models there were of the Amstrad and how powerful they actually were compared to the competition. Great Documentary again. Looking forward to seeing a video on the Amstrad Mega PC someday. I remember thinking that was the coolest idea ever when it came out but never got to see one.
Don't know what year you are talking about, but back in 1988, the Amiga was completely unaffordable in my social circle. All my friends families bought cheap Commodore 64s, or occasionally Amstrad CPCs. I had a TI/99, but that's another story.
Great story! I didn't know the CPC existed until a few years ago. Commodore had such a big grip on the USA low end PC market. And a lot of computer users here might have treated it as a cheap toy computer - as if Electrophonic, Soundesign or Emerson-Symphonic (aka Funai) who made cheap Korean stereos and TV's were trying to sell us a computer.
I don't know what you do for a living, but you should be producing videos like These for a living. Your videos deserve to be on terrestrial tv, instead of the current tripe that is always on. Well done.
Thanks for the story! :) I loved my CPC-464, it was the second full-featured computer that I owned (after the VIC-20 and before the Amiga). I was a teen during those years, I wish I could have afforded a color monitor version or one of the succeeding models. :) Locomotive BASIC is the best BASIC I've seen so far. I loved its interrupt capabilities using the EVERY ... GOTO/GOSUB command. Once I even programmed a GUI simulator for it. I sold the machine off to a friend, which in retrospect, might have been a bad move. I had a Vortex 5 ¼ " floppy drive (704K per side) and a Maxam (IIRC) module (the one with the integrated editor, assembler / disassembler / monitor). At one point, I tested CP/M on it, but I didn't see much use for it for me. (I also ran CP/M 68K on a rare Apple II clone that had a 68K chip as a coprocessor, but generally I found CP/M to be very user unfriendly) I didn't own a PC until 1994! :D As soon as I was given my first Amiga back in 1986, I followed down that path and didn't look back. But all of these machines helped me to learn computer programming and even be ahead of other programmers in some cases (like the Amiga, which made me learn multithread programming long before preemptive multitasking was a thing in the PC world).
This was nice. Now make pt 3 on why the machine was so great. Dive into the hardware. As I can see it now, it is a really simple design, which is 180° different than the overly complex C64, and combined with a higher clock speed, it allowed much nicer games to be made. Even the BASIC deserves a special episode, as it wipes the floor with most other BASIC implementations at the time.
I read, some time ago, that Amstrad were in talks with Acorn to develop a more consumer version of their Archimedes computers. Perhaps thats worth looking into and mentioning too.
Don’t, they were both great machines. The CPC was capable of gorgeous graphics, thanks in no small part due to its vibrant color palette, but the C64 had better sound, generally a better framerate, and a MUCH larger game library.
@@risvegliato That's bullshit. 6502 wasn't any easier to learn than Z80, and given that the SID chip and the AY-3-8910 both had 3 voices, the sound quality is matter of taste.
What an absolutely underrated platform the CPC was. If Sugar actually gave a S#!* about computing then I have no doubt that this machine would have been more successful than the C64. The 6128 was the cream of the crop in my opinion. It beat every other 8 bit micro out there at the time. Amsoft's titles were great, 128k memory, a sturdy, reliable 3" disk drive, CP/M if you wanted it, business and pleasure for 1/4 of the price of an IBM PC. My mate had one and I envied him. It was great.
I think you are a good historian and make great video's on subject matter I learned alot about computer lines thru the years here in the USA computers were way under powered for many years I took classes in the late 80's but soon come to idea that computers here were going to need more power to run anything meaningful here 3.1 started that then 95 was sure footing on barely able to run hardware my college days gave me insight to the stuff in computers once computers got fast enough the old ones were dumped I grabbed as many as possible to referb and give away to toddlers to learn there abc's on it was my son idea at age 2 to make them and give them to kids when I gave him his first pc
FIRST #Winner
Dang it!
me too
me too
The winner is you
Youre winer!
*Big Rigs over the Road theme plays*
Really enjoyed this...thanks.
whoooa the legendary techmoan
“Praise from Caesar is praise indeed.”
Me too. Still think they were foolish to drop the cassette port on the 6128 Plus.
Good documentary...
whoa! we are not worthy (to be entered as a comment below the legendary techmoan)
The only observation from an otherwise excellent video is the reference to the French head of amstrad falling pregnant at an [unfortunate] time. Shows Sugar's rather medieval attitudes which wouldn't have been out of place in those days but are now, as I think he's had similar "problems" with staff / colleagues in more contemporary times.
still, really really excellent historical context - thank you NN.
You and Stuart? Wow
I'm not from the U.K., and everything I know about the British micro wars has been learned through TH-cam videos. Still, it seems clear to me that Clive Sinclair was extraordinary in the sense that his main goal was to benefit society. It doesn't make him the best businessman, but it does make him an admirable human being.
But just imagine if Sinclair had ran a profitable company he might be like SpaceX today
@Brittania Saying it wasn't a force in the Uk is kind of deceiving. I bought a NES on a trip in the UK in a store full of NES games etc. It was still a force, just not the only name in the mind.
But alot of the story is missing and some told is incorrect.
@Brittania Not "as" popular isn't the same as not popular. The NES had a solid ground here in the UK, but it wasn't as big as the Micros or the 16-Bit home computers.
Nope, he wanted to benefit himself through competitive prices for rock bottom hardware.
My first ever computer was an Amstrad CPC464, I was late to the party with it but hey it got me into programming at a very young age, making a computer do what I want? Amazing! 18 years or so later and here I am as a Software Developer, I'll always have a real soft spot for the CPC464 for that reason
Same :o)
Also same. Xmas 1991 we got one. It was handed down form my sisters to me in 1992 and I loved it but, hated loading games on tape being a huge hit or miss if they'll work.
Very well done two part documentary on the history of the Amstrad CPC.
The CPC464 was my first computer. Much nostalgia and happy times. Thanks for the video!
great video as usual.. loved my time at amstrad in the 90s. defo the best days of my working life.. early morning and late night sessions on doom over the company network what a blast!!
Sinclair vs Sugar. Talk about a clash of personalities! :)
Thank you for such a comprehensive history of the CPC family and the ecosystem in which it developed. I lived the microcomputer explosion of the 80´s in Spain. I played with friends´Spectrums and finally purchased a second hand Amstrad PCW512 as my first computer. Fond memories!
Yes, my 'first computer' ! It was a CPC464 with a 'green screen', but my dad and I 'upgraded' it to a CPC6128. I will never sell this fantastic piece of 8bit history ;-)
So much fun I had with this machine, I think it gave me the real kickstart to learn programming..
Really enjoyed this video, keep up the good work!
Good job Nerd, quality doc as always. I bet the retro hour boys are glued ;)
My first real job was selling Amstrad PCs in Western Australia, back in '89 or '90. I still have a letter from Amstrad congratulating me on the highest number of sales in a single month right across Australia ;-)
fantastic content you're making here. I wish I could find documentaries more often of this kind of quality. Honestly I am blown away by the storytelling and information dense style.
Just watched both parts. What an excellently researched, beautifully delivered & compelling documentary :)
Excellent coverage of the CPC. Much appreciated.
AAHhh! The Amstrad CPC6128 ! My first computer back in '87 my eternal love affair 'till today. The 6128 model was especially popular also in Greece where i live (besides France and Spain of course) and Italy and Germany too. It introduced many people to programing (and gaming of course). I can't ever forget the endless fights and arguments with C64 owners (which was another incredible 8bit machine - i must admit) over which had the best games... and the endless winter hours playing head over heels, Pirates, Elite, Prince of Persia and hundreds of other great games with my brother and friends! 80's ruled !!
PS. Thank you for the memories and all the great info, Great job at finding all this, so the older can remember and the younger ones learn the History of Computers !
A rapping French alligator puppet. Goddamn. That's amazing.
I watched part one and 2 - both are an excellent synopsis. And it seems that Mr. Sugar had the right idea. Learned a lot thanks
I was one of the few German Speccy users, before I switched to a C64, but always interisted in all the other 8-bit Systems. This documentary was really well made and I enjoyed it very much. Thanks!
I taught computing in the late 80's and early 90's using the IBM compatible Amstrad PC1512 it was a great machine for teaching and it had the GEM software over the DOS which the students loved.
I love how Sugar went from cheap tat audio to cheaper but better computers to cheap old tech in cheap new forms. I don't personally like the man, but can't deny his business acumen made a big difference in the computer scene in the UK and Europe. Sinclair tried to build down to a price, but Sugar was all "For a few quid more, we can do a LOT better." Well played, sir, very well played.
This has been my favorite story you have done so far. I feel like if I was alive in the 80s with any sort of buying power, I would have thrown in with Amstrad. I like their business model and the way they designed their computers.
i'm not sure how I got here, but i've watched 3 of these back to back and feel nostalgic for things i've never experienced.
The 464 was our first computer in 1988 I believe. My older sister had got it for school and I spent so many hours from the age of 5 playing Harrier Attack. Years later and now a software developer and still loving the 464.
loved every second of this video, and played every game like 35 years ago !
Thank for you this. A well researched and presented trip down memory lane. I really enjoyed it.
Because of your channel I've watched Micro Men and learned so much of the UK computer scene through your stories, videos and sometime silly dialog. Keep up the good work! I'm enjoying it. You're like the UK version of LGR, which is a meant to be a compliment.
The PLUS was my first ever games machine - soo many feels! Cheers for this vid - very informative and scratched a nice nostalgia itch!
Man, the Plus range was bloody impressive for 8 bit technology. The technical improvements really pushed it to a new level, it looks and sounds more like 12 bit or something like that. Crazy good.
Harry Warburg Pretty sure chipset bits have to be exponents of 2 since it’s a binary system but I get what he means.
Yes, 12 bit architectures do exist, as well as 18 bit, 36 bit and even more esoteric ones besides including 14-bit. There's no law saying they have to be powers of 2, and in fact for the longest time multiples of 6 were more favoured as they were more flexible for packing multiple characters of different lengths within a single memory word. It's just that nowadays we have instead standardised mainly on multiples of the 8-bit byte, particularly direct powers of 2, for various reasons. Largely IBM, Intel, the use of computers for accounting and other financial control, the blurring of the lines between computers and calculators as a result can all be thanked for that.
If the well known ASCII alphanumeric coding had become the earliest dominant influential force in the saving of textual information in digital files, we might these days be using even odder multiple-of-7 systems, because ASCII started out as a 7-bit representation (expanded from the 6-bit FIELDATA representation which only had room for capitals, numbers and a few punctuations marks, itself derived from 5-bit baudot / teletype / telegram / paper tickertape encoding which had to switch between two different character sets to provide both letters and numbers/symbols and ended up being used with computers because the equipment already existed and was convenient to interface for use as a combined printer and input terminal...) and only later expanded into the now widely used 8-bit Extended ASCII (having been further extended to 9 bits in some places along the way, an augmentation whose loss pretty much prompted the development of Unicode because 256 chars just aren't enough for a lot of languages and other uses)... and, well, why waste money storing an entire bit that's completely blank?
But, IBM were the market leader in that type of computer for the longest time, and their preferred character encoding, developed in the mid-1960s, was a much reviled little horror called EBCDIC... which although it often didn't offer even as many different characters as ASCII, still employed an 8-bit encoding in order to be extensible and to keep numbers, capital letters, lower case letters, punctuation marks, special symbols, control codes etc each parcelled up into their own distinct, modular, hard to confuse subranges, a bit like modern UTF-16 or -32. The 8-bit character was a useful midway point in the spread of power-of-two bit parcels, being useful for rich-text encoding, fitting two, three or four neatly into a 16, 24 (which was a thing for a short while) or 32 bit word memory structure, and itself being dividable into 4-bit nibbles, or binary coded decimal digits (the BCD of EBCDIC) that could represent financial data with absolute quantised accuracy across a 0000... to 9999.... range with no worries about strange floating point rounding effects or rollovers happening at some weird binary value, and pack in 4, 6 or 8 digits to a single memory word. Or the even smaller 2-bit "crumb" (or, ugh... "tayste"), and then of course the single-bit flag. IBM's thing, after all, had always mainly been in calculating accounts and in tabulating things like census data, where you mainly deal with decimal representations with a certain limited precision (often you're not bothered about anything less than a cent / penny, or at the very most a hundredth of one) and a certain practical limit on the upper value that varies depending on whether you're running a corner shop or a global empire, but typically might demand a minimum of 8 digits of precision but certainly no more than 16, meaning 4-bit digits within a power-of-two (or possibly 12 / 20 / 24 bit) word length allow you to make the most efficient and economic use of the available storage whilst also being scrupulously accurate in your record keeping.
And where IBM led, others followed, even if they weren't using the actual same character encoding style. As their machines went from being big mainframes that filled a whole floor, to smaller ones that filled a room, to large minis that fit along a single wall, they (and their main rivals, such as DEC's PDP minicomputer, that also used 8-bit characters, and a 16-bit word) became ever more pervasive in a number of smaller, everyday, often text-heavy roles, the influence of that decision spread, and the older multiple-of-6 word length standard became increasingly isolated to crusty, proprietary old dinosaur machines that were much more concerned with heavyweight floating-point scientific number crunching and other such things where absolute exact fixed-decimal-point precision wasn't as much of a concern and neither was the storage of very much text.
Intel come into the frame with the birth of the high-end desk calculator, which in the late 60s/early 70s were starting to incorporate some of the functions that had previously been the preserve of mainframe computers and professional accounts tabulating machines. They had been pioneers in the field of integrated circuits, including CPU precursor chips like discrete ALUs and register files, and various companies looking to make such semi programmable, interfaceable caculators (and even the occasional mainframe terminal) started contracting them to create suitable chipsets to condense the required circuitry down from several transistor-strewn boards to a single board with a few ICs on it. Not all of those contracts fully panned out; companies fold, or change their mind about what they want to make, or dislike what's presented, or have a cashflow problem etc, but then Intel is left with significant IP and R&D investment to try and monetise and get a return on their investment from. One such sour deal was for a calculator following what was known as the bit-slice model (other 4-bit examples of which co-contend for the "actual first identifiable CPU" crown), needing four particular components - a keypad and multi-segment fluorescent display driver, a ROM with a few hundred bytes of code, a RAM chip just about large enough to store all the working data for calculations and the user's "memory" space, and a 4-bit CPU to coordinate everything - that became the first four members of the MCS4, or 4xxx range... the 4001, 4002, 4003... and 4004. Someone at Intel realised that actually, within all that, especially if they tweaked the 4001 a bit to make it a general purpose I/O device, they had the rudiments of a full general purpose computer, contained entirely within a quartet of microchips that could be held in one hand, and that such a thing might be a highly valuable product to sell to anyone who wanted a basic-level computer or electronic control system but didn't want to go to the trouble and expense of buying or building a typical mini (which was still composed of multiple circuit boards with dozens of simple ICs and hundreds of discrete transistors, where the most complicated thing might be a 256-bit RAM chip, so heavy on the budget and the power bill), much less a mainframe. So, the MCS4 range, based around the i4004 was born, and the rest is history.
From there it was a fairly natural extension, after a short and largely abortive foray into extending and streamlining the 4004 in the guise of the 4040, and turning it into a microcontroller (the 8041) by further integrating the CPU, ROM/RAM and I/O into a single chip, to extend the data bus width and operating word bit length to 8 bits, with the 8008 and then 8080 (which is the core architecture that still sits at the heart of the Z80 to this day, and which the 8086 is a direct descendant via the 8085). After all, the instructions and many processed data types even in the 4004 were already 8 bits anyway (it's just that BCDs were the main primitive focussed on by that originally calculator-derived design, working on a single pair of one-digit operands per machine cycle), simply transferred in and out of memory, and run through the internal ALU, in 4-bit slices. After which each successive step upwards has been a doubling, as the extended width is often accompanied by some new instructions that let you work on two of the previously largest individual words in a single memory transfer, which is much more convenient for immediately improving throughput than a 1.5x increase which means you can work on three, rather than two, of the second-largest old set of sizes.
Other manufacturers got in on the CPU making game quite quickly after that of course, chiefly Motorola (with the 8-bit 6800 and its derivatives, then later the 16-bit 68000 which was strongly rumoured to be heavily based on the instruction sets from the PDP-8 and PDP-11 16-bit minis), and then Zilog and MOS who somewhat ripped off Intel and Moto then stole their market from under them by selling mostly-compatible processors. Some of their earliest attempts were 4-bit, but typically, seeing how Intel had rapidly moved to downplaying the 4004 and 4040 as not really useful for anything other than the embedded applications that would soon be shifted to the 8041 and its children, they got straight in at the door with 8-bit designs instead. After all, hardly any "serious" computers of the previous generation had buses even as small as 8-bit, let alone 4-bit; most were at least 12, if not 16 or larger, so why artificially bottleneck your architecture in comparison to those for the sake of just four extra legs on the package? The data bus took up relatively little space in those terms vs the address bus, anyway, if you wanted to be able to access any meaningful amount of memory (at least 4kwords, thus needing at least 12 bits of address), and indeed Intel, in the era when memory speeds were still far slower than even the quite low frequency early CPUs, took the space-saving step of multiplexing the data and address onto the same pins. Within a typical memory cycle there was plenty of time to assert first the target address (possibly even broken up into sequential assertion of row, then column, on successive ticks) on the shared bus, then either the data to be written, or wait for the read-out data to arrive on the same pins, without overloading the processor or spending any time waiting that you wouldn't have done anyway with fully separate buses... of course, that came back to haunt them with the 8086, when memory had got a lot faster and sending everything in and out on the same pins became a serious botteneck even with the full 16-bit version never mind the 8088, but it made a lot of sense at first and certainly aided the rapid production and takeup of second-gen 8-bit chips after the initial 4-bit generation proved there was a market for the taking.
Even inamongst all that, by the way, there were a few CPUs with odd word lengths. I can't recall them off the top of my head, but if you do a bit of wikipedia trawling you'll certainly find some early game console and home computer CPUs - also-rans to a fault, pretty much establishing 8-bit as the way to go as a side effect - that have something other than 4, 8 or 16. There's definitely a 12 in there, and a 14 as well I think. Not sure about others. There might even be a real oddball like a 9 or 11...
Thing is, it's actually address range that's more explicitly bounded by powers of two rather than bus width; ie, how many words you can store, rather than how long they are. Usually the former is determined by the physical properties of the individual memory chips in use, whilst the latter is a mix of other chip properties (whether they hold arrays of single bits, 2 bits, 4 bits etc) and more importantly how many chips are installed. You can quite happily, make a 5-bit width computer simply by using 1-bit chips installed in groups of 5 - but the number of 5-bit words will almost certainly be a power of 2 (if indeed not a power of 4), because the addressing limit of each chip's internal array is bounded by how many unique signal combinations can be placed on its address pins (if it has separate row and column pins then it can be an "odd" power of 2; if the same pins are shared for row then column, it'll be an even power of 2, ie a power of 4), and it makes the most sense (and is easier from a system building perspective) to provide the largest possible array internally for a given input address width.
Anyway, tl;dr sidenote - you could argue it _is_ sort of 12-bit in a way. The Plus palette is 4096 colours, formed from 16 levels (4 bits) each of Red, Green and Blue... possibly also the audio, the AY has 4-bit volume for each channel (meaning in simple terms that a sample replayed by setting a stationary wave on one channel then varying the volume can only have 4-bit resolution), and the DMA sample channel has 8-bit resolution... and probably a few other features besides :)
The cherry would be finding that the graphical coprocessor is actually a 4-bit machine, then you could add it to the CPU...
@@markpenrice6253 Why did they not match the 8 MHz of the 16bit computers by using a Z80H ? Also a doubled VRAM speed would make those pixel less blocky ( new video mode ). And of course I want 1px = 1 byte graphics mode with paging.
14:00 - The odd thing about that 60% figure is that it doesn't gel with what I remember people using. Everyone I knew at school had Sinclair, Commodore and Acorn machines, with the occasional Dragon and Oric. I don't recall anyone who had an Amstrad. Is there any data on where in the UK the sales of the 464, etc. were concentrated? I was wondering if it was in specific regions.
I don't remember the Plus range at all, certainly not any adverts for them either.
21:35 - INPUT magazine! Now that I do remember. :D Still have the full binder set. Great times with those mags.
The 60% figure was for the CPC *and* the Spectrum after Amstrad bought Sinclair.
These videos give me a great nostalgia for a past time even though I know we’ve never had it so good for technology and wouldn’t want those items back
Excellent insight into the company and the c464
Great video! You and Kim Justice should win a prize for stuff like this, seriously.
Great Documentary. I've read about Amstrad in various magazines, but never saw one in action.
Sometimes I wish a French crocodile would rap into my face.
I think we all want that, deep down.
GIMME
VERYLOL(TM)
I fitted out an I.T. room at school with 15 CPC 6128s and DMP 2000 printers. They functioned faultlessly and with software like Protext, Supercalc & Rembrandt offered a great introduction to Computing. I even sold them for a reasonable price after 5 years use.
I was lucky enough to get a 6128 when it came out. It definitely had great titles but another great feature was that it came with a Basic programming tutorial where you'd learn to program a phone book. Got me hooked.
Very well put together. I enjoyed watching this bit of history.
My friend in Ireland had one of these color model CPC 464 in the 80's. We spent many hours playing games, and typing in code from the back pages of Amstrad Action magazine. A few years later I bought a green screen model of the CPC 464 - Great computers. My cousins had a 6128 that I thought was amazing because it had a disc drive! LOL
i miss my 464 & games at £2.99 ,., but the loading times will never be missed
I can still see the message after waiting an eternity for the games to load "Read Error A" or "Read Error B" :\
@@mjarbar3204 Often you could just rewind back to that loading block error and play from there and it would reload it and carry on, but not always :(
The Amstrad CPC6128 got this awkward girl through some tough teenage years
Ditto, though for me it was Turrican, and Elite.
My CPC464 was my only friend growing up and it introduced me to all of it's friends such as Footballer of the year, Elite, Rama Rana.
bulletproofblouse Terraria is also on my list of favorite games, its so fun
Spindizzy is awesome! I showed my 10 year old Daughter it and she described it as "8-bit Minecraft gaming".
For me it was Cauldron and Elite. Good times, good times.
21:31 INPUT magazine… I still have all of mine!!! I still have my 6128 as well. I adapted quite a few programs from INPUT and saved them to 3” disks...
I bought a 3.5” floppy drive for my 6128 so that I could archive my 3” disks. One 3.5” floppy could store the contents of two full 3” disks - 3” disks only held 178k per side.
I named my 6128 (only time I ever named a computer) Madeline, in homage to Maddie Hayes (Moonlighting) and Madeline from Electric Dreams which was a favourite movie of mine from that time. Being a nerdy person, “Madeline” was an acronym for Microprocessor Accessed Data Entry Logical Input Number Equipment. I can’t believe I still remember that!
I learned all of my skills on my 6128. Hacking as well as WP and Desktop Publishing. I had bought a DMP2000 (still have that too) and I turned out all sorts of stuff. All of my University assignments and projects were carried out on the 6128 and printer. I even purchased a ROM chip that allowed me to read and write to PC formatted (FAT12) floppy disks. I had originally made my own ROM board for two chips but later sprung the cash for a 6-socket ROM board.
Then I went the PC way with an Olivetti Quaderno notebook (still have that too!)
And then began the long descent into MS-DOS and Windows eventually leading to Apple.
But my 6128 is still my first computer. Back when I was able to get a £400 loan from my bank and pay it off monthly with my part-time job in BHS…
Apart from replacing the belts in the disk drive, the 6128 never needed any maintenance.
Of course, if I was to set it up today, I’d like to check the state of the belts - it’s been about 15 years since it was last switched on and I’d like to check the capacitors in the monitor/PSU.
Not too shabby for something that is 33 years old.
great video thanks - and your constant use of vectors whenever possible pleases me greatly :)
I love the style of presentation. I can see a lot of research went into this. Great Stuff!!
I loved my CPC6128, it got me though my Computer Studies GCSE as I wrote my final project on it, an Othello (Reversi) game you played against the computer.
Your channel is so very well named! The shear nostalgia I feel watching your videos is amazing!
Wow, loved my CPC 464, writing my own proggys for my AD&D games!
ugh just as i finished my tea i find the second episode
oh well another one it is
Excellent work as ever 👍
Bloody brilliant video, loved part 1 and 2. You put a lot of effort and detail into each video you do 👍. Keep up the amazing work and can't wait till you next video 😎.
Another great video, Nostalgia Nerd. Great informative content presented in an exemplary way with excellent visual work. If you ever feel that it might not be worth all the time and effort in making these videos, I'd like to assure you that it is appreciated greatly.
You make some of the best documentaries I have seen on TH-cam - keep it up! -Larry
Well put together! Enjoyed the nostalgia trip. Good work on both vids. Documentary quality mate.
Not often i comment on vids these days but i had to as a proud and happy 6128 owner. I remember the christmas i got it. I was a very lucky lad, even got the lightgun too! I remember my dad being smug about the fact "It's got a disk drive son, that'll be quicker than your mates, none of that tape rubbish". Oh how i lorded it over my C64 mates when their games failed to load. Sadly it did not do what my parents wanted it to do and somehow improve my maths and English. since i spent all the time playing games on it. But i remember my mum actually got some software for it for writing and doing accounting. Don't recall her ever using the dot matrix printer but i had to show her how to save onto disks bless her. I still felt like the odd one out owning one though, sadly me and my cousin who lived two doors down couldnt share games as he had the tape version. And yes its easy to see nowadays how dire some of the ports were. It was pretty much consigned to the loft the minute we got our Packard Hell in 95. That was a really fun bit of catching up though. It's still in the loft too.....
These look like nifty micros that as an American I was completely unaware of, nice mini documentary, thanks. BTW, those rapping crocodiles are pure nightmare fuel. Also BTW, congrats in following John Romero as a guest on "The Retro Hour".
This all happened during my formative years, but I was in the states and had no exposure to the UK micro-computing world. I was never able to fully appreciate Newton Pulsifer's background story until now.
I liked that lo-fi, industrial sounding percussion I heard in some of those CPC games!
is that Ashens doing the vo at 5:50?
GovernorVentura that's what i thought too.
a colab would be awesome.
and throw in Guru Larry as well for good measure.
GovernorVentura in the first part Larry, Ashens and Slopes Game Room did voice overs
was about to ask the same question
GovernorVentura Too bad they only used him in France.
Great follow-up to part 1.
That 464 Plus is a nice looking machine. I might have to look into the cost of importing some of these old British computers as they look like they'd be fun to mess with.
I didn't think I could take 2 spoonfuls of Suga in one go, but here I am back for Park 2. Great videos, well edited and put together. When I find a job I enjoy and is more than minimum wage I will become a Patron.
Crazy good series of videos. Will definitely be checking out the rest 🖥🤓
Excellent follow up. Great work.
I used to play Barbarian and Bombjack on Amstrad CPC: insert the cassette tape, wait half an hour for the game to load then enjoy, in those days playing a video games was something you earned and enjoyed even on a tiny green and white screen!
Overlander... wow now there's a blast from the past, that was one of my favourite games on my 464 back in the day. I really should dig out my old tapes, there's so many games I never managed to complete, or completely misunderstood.
Thoroughly enjoyed both parts!
Awesome work dude. Enjoyed it to a point of extreme moistness.
And the Amstrad Spectrum straight out of the starting blocks had a decent keyboard. Sir Clive never could get his head around the need for such a bloody obvious thing.
great doco, better than most tv ones on the subject
I love my CPC (and miss my Mega-PC. A lightning strike took it too young. :'( )
Brilliant video. Keep up the great work 😃
I don't know how you can make such good content. Please keep up this channel. Were does all this knowledge come from.
Fascinating, i never knew the plus range had extra hardware features, ive been educated :) My only real memories of Amstrad back in the day was being offered a 464 with colour monitor second hand (was still crazy like £150 for a second hand one at the time), my parents couldn't afford it but i phoned my best friend and his parents bought it for him. I was a bit jealous but seeing as we were best friends I could play on it almost whenever I wanted :D
Great vid - I really learnt a lot! Non of my mates had the Amstrad CPC so I never got to try it. It was all Amiga's and Atari ST's where I live!
A friend of mine had the Amstrad CPC 464+ with that Burning Rubber game. Felt a little outdated even then cos we were all moving onto Amigas and Mega Drives. Never realised quite how many models there were of the Amstrad and how powerful they actually were compared to the competition.
Great Documentary again. Looking forward to seeing a video on the Amstrad Mega PC someday. I remember thinking that was the coolest idea ever when it came out but never got to see one.
Don't know what year you are talking about, but back in 1988, the Amiga was completely unaffordable in my social circle. All my friends families bought cheap Commodore 64s, or occasionally Amstrad CPCs. I had a TI/99, but that's another story.
Fanatastic documentary, well done!
Great story! I didn't know the CPC existed until a few years ago. Commodore had such a big grip on the USA low end PC market. And a lot of computer users here might have treated it as a cheap toy computer - as if Electrophonic, Soundesign or Emerson-Symphonic (aka Funai) who made cheap Korean stereos and TV's were trying to sell us a computer.
Excellent video, very nostalgic too.
I don't know what you do for a living, but you should be producing videos like These for a living. Your videos deserve to be on terrestrial tv, instead of the current tripe that is always on. Well done.
Thanks for the story! :) I loved my CPC-464, it was the second full-featured computer that I owned (after the VIC-20 and before the Amiga). I was a teen during those years, I wish I could have afforded a color monitor version or one of the succeeding models. :) Locomotive BASIC is the best BASIC I've seen so far. I loved its interrupt capabilities using the EVERY ... GOTO/GOSUB command. Once I even programmed a GUI simulator for it. I sold the machine off to a friend, which in retrospect, might have been a bad move. I had a Vortex 5 ¼ " floppy drive (704K per side) and a Maxam (IIRC) module (the one with the integrated editor, assembler / disassembler / monitor). At one point, I tested CP/M on it, but I didn't see much use for it for me. (I also ran CP/M 68K on a rare Apple II clone that had a 68K chip as a coprocessor, but generally I found CP/M to be very user unfriendly) I didn't own a PC until 1994! :D As soon as I was given my first Amiga back in 1986, I followed down that path and didn't look back. But all of these machines helped me to learn computer programming and even be ahead of other programmers in some cases (like the Amiga, which made me learn multithread programming long before preemptive multitasking was a thing in the PC world).
utterly brilliant videos i still own a cpc 464 and love it
nice video on amstrad looking forward for more
I had a friend with a 6128, I'll never forget the first time I saw Dragon's Lair. Blew my mind.
Great work. Thanks for doing this.
Great video..any chance on a vid on the Sam Coupe ?
The second track is one the best 8-bit composition I've ever heard.
This was nice. Now make pt 3 on why the machine was so great. Dive into the hardware. As I can see it now, it is a really simple design, which is 180° different than the overly complex C64, and combined with a higher clock speed, it allowed much nicer games to be made. Even the BASIC deserves a special episode, as it wipes the floor with most other BASIC implementations at the time.
Am I the only one who can't get enough of the Sugar voice he does? I'm fucking dying.
I read, some time ago, that Amstrad were in talks with Acorn to develop a more consumer version of their Archimedes computers. Perhaps thats worth looking into and mentioning too.
Great vid. Really interesting. Have you done a video about the mega pc? I looked but couldnt find it
Great videos, impressed with the production
I really enjoyed this and a bit of slopes gaming added to the mix. :)
Man, after watching this and part one, I feel so ripped off having a Commodore 64 back then. :p
no, the c64 was much better as far as programming and sound are concerned. much better for music, which is what i used it for at the time, not games.
Don’t, they were both great machines. The CPC was capable of gorgeous graphics, thanks in no small part due to its vibrant color palette, but the C64 had better sound, generally a better framerate, and a MUCH larger game library.
@@risvegliato That's bullshit. 6502 wasn't any easier to learn than Z80, and given that the SID chip and the AY-3-8910 both had 3 voices, the sound quality is matter of taste.
15:33 please does anyone know what this game is called? I’ve been searching for it for years. Thank you!
@nostalgianerd
@Nostaligia Nerd
Astonishing work!
Thank you!!
Cheers!
What an absolutely underrated platform the CPC was. If Sugar actually gave a S#!* about computing then I have no doubt that this machine would have been more successful than the C64. The 6128 was the cream of the crop in my opinion. It beat every other 8 bit micro out there at the time. Amsoft's titles were great, 128k memory, a sturdy, reliable 3" disk drive, CP/M if you wanted it, business and pleasure for 1/4 of the price of an IBM PC. My mate had one and I envied him. It was great.
I think you are a good historian and make great video's on subject matter I learned alot about computer lines thru the years here in the USA computers were way under powered for many years I took classes in the late 80's but soon come to idea that computers here were going to need more power to run anything meaningful here 3.1 started that then 95 was sure footing on barely able to run hardware my college days gave me insight to the stuff in computers once computers got fast enough the old ones were dumped I grabbed as many as possible to referb and give away to toddlers to learn there abc's on it was my son idea at age 2 to make them and give them to kids when I gave him his first pc
Nicely done mate thoroughly enjoyed it 🤗🤗🤗 Kim 😁😁😁
Sugar was one hell of a businessman! the dude knew his shit!!!!
Excellent video, I really enjoyed it, thank you.