In 1986

[ImmortalA1000]

See, the funny thing is that no matter how horrible a machine the Amstrad PC1512 was (8mhz 8086, 512k, CGA, beeper, mono monitor) it did allow Amstrad to be around a lot longer than Commodore, Atari, Acorn etc.

It was probably a really significant moment in the history of computer companies because coming in with a £399.99+sales tax (VAT) PC compatible really propped up the coffers for Amstrad. I presume they exceeded their required sales targets of 60,000 a month minimum to make any kind of profit at all.

Amstrad also negotiated hard to get some £200 business packages down to £50 level (not Lotus 123 and Microsoft chose to release cut down versions not drop the price) so Amstrad did do a proper job of the entire 'dirt cheap' IBM PC compatible project and they were there first which did make all the difference. It even came with GEM, well the PC1512 disks I have do include GEM.

The Commodore and Atari alternatives both used an 8088 which is significantly slower, IIRC Commodore PC1 has 4.77mhz and Atari PC1 had 8mhz turbo mode. Both did have EGA not CGA though but to a business man this isn't really important. Both came out a year later and they didn't do anything about the fact a top end 'industry standard' PC application cost as much as the machine where as Amstrad did some deals to license packages, rebrand them and give the copyright holder a £5 royalty.

The fact by 1987 most businesses thought Atari and Commodore only made games machines for their kids probably didn't help where as Amstrad made all sorts of things like TVs, VCRs, HiFis etc.

Used to see that Amstrad PC everywhere, video rental stores, estate agents etc etc but never saw an Atari or Commodore PC.

You have to wonder if Commodore/Atari had been first before Amstrad and matched the price and done the deals with companies to get budget rereleases of suitably professional software if they would have earned enough to actually improve their home computers.

Putting in an 8088 smacks of cluelessness to me personally or just jumping on the bandwagon after the horse has bolted. They seemed to do the absolute minimum to attempt to get into that market and failed miserably. Sure the PC1512 is fugly and has a nasty Atari 65XE quality keyboard probably but that doesn't matter. In 1986 office managers saved £1000s opting for the PC1512 and Amstrad licensed packages on offer. They already knew they needed a PC, matching the 8086 spec of more expensive clones, bit of a no brainer...'nobody ever got fired for NOT buying an IBM PC XT and getting a bunch of PC1512 machines' was probably the new moto in the UK small business/shop owner/sole trader scene

Odd how little I care about what was probably the machine that meant as Commodore and Atari vanished Amstrad was raking in the cash for years to come in the computer business.

Of course he probably got the idea for his dirt cheap MS DOS compatible from the huge sales of the crappy CP/M based green screen 8bit PCW8256 of 1985 which also included some dot matrix printer (and useless 3" disk drive) but many offices had the PCW8256/8512 for donkey work, it was 80 column and it worked well enough with that 70s OS.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

You have to wonder if Commodore/Atari had been first before Amstrad and matched the price and done the deals with companies to get budget rereleases of suitably professional software if they would have earned enough to actually improve their home computers.

Commodore was actually first ... the German division finished the PC clone already in 1984. What happened next is unclear.
Some were sold in Germany in 84 for around 5.000 DM which was still much cheaper than anything from IBM at the time.

But in the chaotic years after Tramiel left C= the PC project was seemingly put on hold for a couple of years - there probably was not enough money and resources left to have the new C128 and the Amiga as well as the PC line in parallel production and development

Part of the PC-team in Braunschweig, Germany was repurposed to develop the A2000 ... other employees left and went to Schneider, developing the "Schneider Euro PC".
The latter product was very successful in Germany, much like the Amstrad PCs were in UK.

C= tried to catch up with the PC development later but never really did, but only wasted resources ... except from Germany sales for Commodore PCs were close to null.

I am torn here ... at one side it might have helped Commodore in the mid 80s to pursue the PC business more aggressively. Later on they just wasted resources with an own PC development team and would have done better by just rebranding cheap boards from far east (ESCOM and Gateway made millions this way)

At the other side I wished C= would have believed more in its own products und really concentrated resources und development on the Amiga line, much like Apple did with the Mac.

[Megalomaniac]

It's really sad that people were brainwashed into buying a system like that, when the ST cost little more for so much more power, although an Amiga in 1986 meant an A1000 for 3/4 times as much. I guess being able to run most of the same software at home as you did at work must have been a lure. That was eight years before Commodore went bankrupt though, so it must have been Amstrad's continued PC range (which was usually at the low-cost end, remember the ones with a Megadrive built in?) that kept them profitable. Always amuses me when browsing through old mags and seeing Amstrad's PR quotes from Nick Hewer though, when you think that he basically became a game show host later.

[ImmortalA1000]

The point is businesses needed PC DOS compatibles to put on desks in their offices and £399.99 for a PC 8086 @ 8mhz in 1986 was the bargain of the century. Double disk drive and hard drive (20mb IIRC) upgrade was also just as cheap. But that is only half the story like I said, they also needed the price of the software they needed to run to be dropped in price by the same huge amount, which was the whole point. Amstrad did both those things, they didn't just make a dirt cheap 8086. Atari/Commodore did a jump on the bandwagon for 20% more with a 75% slower 8088 CPU design year later that is not exactly world class business strategy. Amstrad made it possible to get a equally cheap professional accounts package to send your tax returns to the government etc. It's a complete project to solve a problem and make huge gains into a market much larger than the 16bit home computer market.

Even if you bought a slower, more expensive Commodore/Atari PC1 a year later you wouldn't be buying the £200 original release of SAGE Accounts or whatever, you would still be buying the Amstrad branded £50 re-release (identical program, not a cut down version). That's really what brings it home how good a job Amstrad did and how much everybody else missed that huge money earning potential.

Never said I like anything Amstrad made, my opinions on even the 486/Pentium 1 PC running Win 3.x+DOS are also well known lol. I did say it's something I didn't care about then or now but clearly is the reason why Amstrad never struggled with cash flow after that little successfully executed project that nobody else really tackled both from hardware and software pricing issues of existing competition in the "clone wars"

[Gorf]

Amstrad certainly helped to bring the PC to UK and Europe
(not sure this was a good thing - lol)

But also not sure what's the point of it... they had some remarkable offers in the 80s - ok.
In the 90s their market presence seems to have shrunk to UK. Never even heard of Amstrad PS in the 90s...
And they slowly abandoned the PC business around 95 and invested in telecommunication ...
Finally they made a lucrative deal with sky to produce decoder boxes and satellite receivers.
That's what kept Amstrad alive in the 90s and not the PC business.

In 1996 Alan Sugar cashed out ...

[Megalomaniac]

Still, Amstrad were making PCs as late as 1995, after Commodore or Atari had folded, so maybe they were doing something right. The Amstrad systems had CGA in monochrome, almost the worst possible graphics in the PC world (lacking the resolution of the old Hercules monochrome system, or the potential colour of EGA or even CGA), but it was good enough for business tasks, and it meant that a startup business could run similar software to bigger companies spending 4 times as much on more established PC brands. Assuming that they found ways to make the Amstrad PCs profitable, I can see the business merit of them.

I think the integrated screens of the CPC had a very good profit margin too, because while the public viewed them like expensive monitors, in reality they were just cheap TVs with no tuner.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Still, Amstrad were making PCs as late as 1995, after Commodore or Atari had folded, so maybe they were doing something right.

Atari actually never folded:
they were still active until 1996, when they merged with JTS Inc. (reverse takeover)....
So the Tramiels cashed out the same year Alan Sugar did.

The Amstrad systems had CGA in monochrome, almost the worst possible graphics in the PC world (lacking the resolution of the old Hercules monochrome system, or the potential colour of EGA or even CGA), but it was good enough for business tasks, and it meant that a startup business could run similar software to bigger companies spending 4 times as much on more established PC brands. Assuming that they found ways to make the Amstrad PCs profitable, I can see the business merit of them.

Michael Dell did the same thing around 85, 86 in USA with "PC's Limited" as his company was called in the first years... a PC for just $800 in 1985:



But somehow Dell is still selling PCs...