The PC That Cracked Europe - Amstrad PC1512 and 1640 | Computer History
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Europe was weened on low cost 8bit micros in the home, spending in excess of £1000 on a home computer seemed absured when we were used to £399 for a complete machine including monitor. So how would we ever adopt IBM PC's with their huge price tags? Amstrad had the answer. Lets take a look at the PC1512 and PC1640 which took Europe by storm.
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What are your views on the Amstrad PC1512? Did you have one? Did it launch in your region under a different name and if so how was it received? I'd love to hear your memories. Thank you for watching and thanks to MrLurch for sharing his experiences of using the DB9 joystick port and PixelVixen for her feedback in helping create this video. Neil - RMC
A friend of mine had one and I remember being absolutely fascinated with Autoroute. It was DOS based back then and seeing the maps being drawn up on the screen with route details from any two points in the country was almost mesmerising.
me and my dad had each a 1512 back in the 90's. i had one with a simmilar hdd, that's in your 1640, my dad's had one with a black bezel and green light. i had color monitor on mine, where as dad had a monochrome on his. nostalgic to see those beaut's. greetings for Denmark.
My computer studies teacher got 3 pc 1512, to replace some 6128's. He then threw the manual at my mate and I. We taught him how to use it.
I live in Greece. Used to have a PC1640 from 1987 to 1995. My bro couldn't afford the hi-res monitor option, so we got it with the low-res colour monitor. For years I didn't know it still had EGA 320X200 16 colour capability, so all I had experienced was the appalling CGA 4 colours. Imagine my surprise when I realized that in 1995... Some games (Lemmings for example) still required higher EGA resolution modes, so it still was CGA for me.GEM Desktop came bundled with the 1640 and it used the Amstrad specific graphics mode you mentioned. Eventually I got a 486 and we donated our Amstrad to a collector. The PC1640 was really reliable. Over the years the only issue we had was once a disk drive belt that came off, which we promptly slid back in place after disassembly and never gave us any trouble afterwards.
I always thought they were dirty. Filling the gap between Tandy / Nimbus and a real IBM PC Clone. They did, though, run MS Flight Sim - which was the real test. Were they better than Goldstar or similar semi-custom brands. No. Not at all. I think you missed the real reason people went for them, which imvho was because there were so many CPC machines and dumb electronic typewriters - they were already a brand. Like Casio. Alan just didn't look over his shoulder in time to catch the wave of true clones.
Doris' poetry was missing the last line. "If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man. He saw it, too."
We had a series of books here in australia in the 80's with verses like this, and indeed, this one, but it stopped after "drew their swords and shot each other". I wonder if Doris did become an author!?
@@ballsrgrossnugly no, it's a well known nonsense poem from the 1940s.
@@medes5597 Haha, I was being dumb. Pretty much all of the poems in that book were old ones that they just wrote down and compiled.
@@ballsrgrossnugly Was that "Far Out Brussel Sprout" etc?
@@godfreypoon5148 yarp
The nonsense verse reminds me of one from my childhood in the (very) early 60s. One night when climbing up the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish that he would go away!
One fine day in the middle of the night, the Atlantic ocean caught alight. A blind man saw it, a deaf man heard it, a man without any legs ran to fetch the fire brigade. The fire brigade came, without any wheels, ran over a dead cat and half killed it.
You may not be aware of this, but that's a very well thought of academically and much written about poem called Antigonish - en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigonish_%28poem%29?wprov=sfla1 As an example, David Bowie's famous song "The Man Who Sold The World" was directly inspired by that poem. It's got a huge artistic footprint, inspired many many artists and poems. It was one of Sylvia Plath's favourite verses and she considered it "near perfect" because of how it flows. The mix of the childish sounding, simplistic verses and the kind of dark vibe it carries is probably why it's so well thought of and inspiring to other artists. Anyway the more you know, and all that.
Reasons why I watch Retro Man Cave 1. Fascinating computer content 2. The most relaxing voice on KZhead
I worked for Amstrad in their attempts to break into the U.S. PC market. I worked in their Longview, Texas warehouse first doing basic upgrades to systems like 640k or adding a hard drive. Later I worked in tech support and customer service in both Longview and Irving, Texas.
I don't know if you know this or not, but was there ever any plans to bring the CPC stateside? I had a PPC640 in my collection for a time. Nice little machine.
We had the 640k version in the late 80s, growing up in College Station TX. Purchased by my parents at JCPenney on credit card because it was expensive. Learned alot on that machine- enjoyed learning DOS, GEM GUI/paint and programming as a preteen. The Netflix program Halt and Catch Fire reminds me of this time period which I've also enjoyed. Thanks for the memories👍
@@jeremyb4493 alas, I wish I read your comment earlier, so to watch Halt and Catch Fire in time... my family watches so much garbage netflix that I stay away for days, weeks sometimes, watching retro computing channels instead. We enjoyed watching some together, The Flash for example and Young Sheldon (ok, not netflix) and now there is no regular way to watch it in SE Europe. Go figure. The way it is presented on Spectrum on demand makes it seem unlikely that it will be on netflix periodically, like some other programmes.
Do you remember what the address of the building was? I live around 1hr from there. Id like to see if its still there
@@jeremyb4493Halt and catch fire is awesome! they captured that time period PERFECTLY!
This video takes me back to 1992 / 1993 - I had a PC1512 as my very first PC which was shortly followed by a PC1640 with EGA and a 20Mb MFM HDD! I still remember the sound when turning it on; was like a washing machine going into a spin cycle! I also bought an upgrade for the 1640 in the form of an external 3.5" floppy drive. It was pretty useless only being 720k but it allowed me to take files into school and make copies of my friend's software. I adored those machines and even now in 2019, when I have the need to type a DOS command, I always think of them
My parents bought me this computer in 1988 when I was eight years old. It was my first computer. Wonderfull times! Btw: In parts of Europe these computers were sold under the brand name of "Schneider"!
Many of AMSTRAD's products were marketed under the Schneider brand name in German-speaking countries, including both their CPC- and PC-clone ranges, as well as their TVs and ...errr… 'Hi-Fi' systems.
Probably a good way to find parts
wow your parents were very forward thinking and generous! lol yes Schneider, what a brand I remember they also had some very crappy, yet very appealing stereo's.
@@BertGrink Amstrad never made HiFi, they made LoFi that looked like HiFi. 😂
Doris' diskette has freaked me out.
definitely a serial killer
Is it a clue about something Doris was involved in?!?!?!? ILLUMINATI CONFIRMED!!!!
My Dad's first IBM PC compatible was a 1640, and I loved it. I had learned about everything there was to know about out TRS-80. The 1640 was such a step up I was in heaven. I haven't heard anything about that or the 1512 since. What an amazing walk down memory lane!
I never owned one but my first job I worked in a computer shop in sheffield UK and we had the 1512 and the 1640 on display. Didn't sell many though. Most parents walking into our shop looking for a computer for the family walked out with an Amiga A500... oh the memories..
I used a 1640 with a 30mb HDD at work, and I was so impressed with how quiet it was I bought a 1512 to use at home. The 1640 was colour but I could only afford monochrome at home. Had the machine till 1993/4. I remember Ian R Sinclair wrote several books for both machines.
As an 80s / 90s kid i remember a time when any IBM pc was a rare thing that most people couldn't afford and only one of my friends dads owned, then the phase around the early 90s when PC's became more and more popular and affordable, and the eventual death of all other platforms when 3d accelerators became commonplace. Still fondly remember the amiga 500+ cartoon classics pack that my dad bought, with its amazing (for the time) graphics and sound.
@@dixie_rekd9601 The Commodore Amiga was ahead of it's time. Even C64 was awesome.
Good choice can't go wrong with an Amiga they were ahead of their time!!
That poem was apparently much older. Some light googling lead me to this explanation: The book "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren" by Iona and Peter Opie, published in 1959, catalogues many different schoolyard poems (including this one) from throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Opie noted that this poem had been collected in 12 different schools around the UK, but that it had also been collected, with almost no variation, fifty years before. It was probably older than that, too.
I remember a store in Canada called "The Brick" that also sold these Amstrad computers. They came with GEM Write and GEM Paint. They were very nice machines and reminded me of the Tandy PCs from Radio Shack.
I bought mine at Club Price, 1987. :)
I remember wasting a great many hours trying to install a hard disk in my 1512, I bought the Western Digital WD1001D card new and a used Seagate MFM drive from a rally. You had to jumper the card for cylinders, heads, and so on. It would recognise the drive, low level format it, partition it... but it would not appear as a C drive, try as hard as I might. It was only many years later that two nuggets of information came to hand that might have saved me much frustration one was that the ROS was just not BIOS compatible, and the other was that the WD controller cards fitted by Amstrad in the 1640 apparently had a custom ROM fitted; presumably to fix the compatibility! But I loved the 1512 to bits- I spent hours programming in BASICA (20-odd years later and I am a professional software developer) and hooked it to my amateur radio packet modem and sat up into the small hours playing on bulletin boards and node hopping. Happy days!!
I added a newer Seagate ST-something 40mb MFM hard drive that came with it's own controller that loads it's own BIOS stuff in a PC1512SD some 10 years later after I got it and it worked out of the box. The biggest problem was making custom drive mount to secure the hard drive in the box.
Great job! Of course Doris' verse reads like nonsense. You need the 8087 math coprocessor to decrypt it. That's why she removed it.
Actually, at least the first sentence makes perfectly sense in context of fictional zombie stories or comparables.
I live in Denmark and got my PC1512 in 1988, with the monochrome screen. I only had it for a few month, until I started to expand it. First I got the extra RAM, so it had 640K. Then I put in an internal 1200 baud modem (wow it was fast ). Within the first year, I got a WD 32 GB HDD, and a CTRL card. The bracket for the mount of the HDD, I made in aluminium. It was a fantastic machine :-) I used it a lot with Wordstar, and also installed a parallel print port, as i bought a matrix printer. Later one of the 360 floppy drives were replaced with a 3,5" FD 720K. All together I had it for almost 4 years, until I moved on... Thanks for the great video you made! It brought me down memory lane :-)
The poem is traditional, repeated in schoolyards for hundreds of years. There's a million variants. A combined version is: One fine day in the middle of the night, Two dead men got up to fight. Back-to-back they faced one another, Drew their swords and shot each other. One was blind and the other couldn't see, So they chose a dummy for a referee. A blind man went to see fair play, A dumb man went to shout "hooray!" A paralyzed donkey passing by, Kicked the blind men in the eye, Knocked him through a nine-inch wall, Into a dry ditch and drowned them all. A deaf policeman heard the noise, And went to arrest the two dead boys. If you don't believe this lie is true, Ask the blind man - he saw it too! (See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonsense_verse)
Ahh, thanks for this version :D
My dad told me this one many times when I was a kid. He thought it was the funniest thing. :)
Yes, that was the poem I remember, maybe Doris was from Portsmouth, my dad told me that version and he grew up in Portsmouth.
whoa and at that a childhood verse was finally finished.
Suddenly Doris reached popularity unheard of 😉
I had an Amstrad PC1512! This was my first computer in 1987 and I was only 5 years old but I remember it so well. For the next 5 years I taught myself everything I could about it and read through the manual and learnt all of the DOS commands and it kick-started my interest in all things PC related. Great nostalgic video - thanks!
the way that monitor seats into the case hhnnnnnnng
I attended a BASIC programming course - my very first programming course ever! - at a local youth center back in early 1987, and I remember we were using *one* Schneider PC for the entire class (yep, silicon was apparently expensive back in the day). I don't remember whether it was a 1512 or 1640 though. Anyway, thanks for one more great video on this great channel, Neil! I really appreciate your content!
I learned to programme C+ on these in 1989 doing my C+G 223 diploma ;) They were, erm, very good for that actually. I always wanted to look inside one as I couldn't at my place of education! Thanks so much for putting to rest, a desire I never knew I had so many decades later ;)
Our first family computer was a PC1512 and I remember it clearly despite probably only being 7 or so at the time. I remember playing with GEM and Locomotive basic, spending hours programming it to draw shapes on the screen. I think we had a colour screen on it. There was also a game I used to play that had something to do with driving an armoured boat around and you got a cassette with music on it to play at the same time :) Hours or fun! I really enjoyed this one! I had to send a screenshot of the opening but with the two 1512 and 1640 to my dad :)
I used both of them at Kilmarnock College where they just created a lab with them for the electronics course. They weren't great machines, even then the hard drives were poor as one of four 1640s died and the rest of the lab was 1512s for cost (another 12 machines). We did EPROM programming on those machines, which they were terrific for, and also wrote Pascal programs, and Pascal was a beautiful language at the time. The Irvine annex of Kilmarnock College had the PCW word processor and I couldn't count the number of times someone typed up a report and then lost it because if you ejected the disc without saving you couldn't put in another one and save it (or so I was told - I never used them). For myself, I kept using the BBC Master who's word processor View was basic but effective. Easier to learn than WordPefect. Later using the Acorn Archimedes where its OS was far in advance of the Microsoft offerings of the time. Computer Concepts Impression was one of the best word processors available and I did a lot of amazing reports for college at the time. Later I would change to a PC, at 386 level, but that was partly to do with having more engineering software available. Running two computers as I progressed to university, doing course work on the PC, but writing reports on the Archimedes. Alas, I then had to upgrade to the 486 and the selection of games for the PC was far superior so the Archimedes got used less and less until I really had to keep using the PC for compatibility with uni that I gave up on the Acorn product. The Archimedes's RISC OS was better than windows 3.1, and the word processing still was better than Word, but everything else was advancing at such a pace that Acorn was being left behind both in hardware and software. In all that time I never knew anybody who bought their own Amstrad computer, not one of my college or university friends. We bought other computers, we even built our own from parts (we were doing electronic engineering courses!), but I have never known anybody who has actually bought an Amstrad PC!
I was Amstrad certified to do repairs on those things back in the 80s. We had loads of them at the Government place I was working at the time.
what is the second video chip for? thanks
Wasn't certified - fix em anyway. Nice little machines.
Damned if I can remember, sorry. I had forgotten all about them until I saw this video! I did find the service manual for it though - archive.org/details/amstrad-pc1640-pc-md-pc-cd-pc-ecd-service-manual. Might be something in there that provides an answer.
"Back to back they faced each other, drew their swords then shot each other."
Small point - GEM was more stable than Windows, so high end DTP and the like stayed GEM based until Windows 3.1 became the de facto standard. GUIs were resource hungry so the likes of Lotus 1-2-3 stayed with DOS to make them faster until CPU designs improved. Also having the function keys on the left of the keyboard was more ergonomic, IBM had them there until the success of the PC caused some internal political wrangling and the independent PC team was subsumed by the more traditional factions. They moved the F keys to the top so the keyboard would more closely resemble a 'proper' computer, ie with the awkward to use 'teleprinter' style keyboard layout (fashion victims have always been with us). The 4x3 display remains popular today particularly with writers as that extra screen height for a given width makes working with text easier (I am told it is also better for web browsing). This is particularly important with laptops where to get the same amount of text in the same font size on a modern 'reduced height' (cough 'widescreen') display you need a much bigger machine (to match a 15 inch Thinkpad laptop you need a 19 inch letterbox display). A4 displays seem to have disappeared now as people just buy a 23 inch screen where they will be doing page layout and the like, one lady has hers set to a 4x3 display and uses the 'spare space' for post-it notes. The migration toward that futuristic ideal of the Sinclair Z88 (with its super-ultra-wide display and flat rubbery keyboard) may explain the increasing popularity for talking boxes for home users. For productive work of many kinds those older machines remain viable and often preferable (for one thing the longer you use something the easier it gets to use it). One writer I knew was still happily using their Amstrad PCW (albeit with a 3.5 inch drive and a hard drive added) in 2010. It wouldn't do video editing or play modern games, but they just needed it to earn a living.
The upper line of F-keys seems to come from terminals, and things like the 3270PC which used a "hybrid" keyboard with elements of the PC and terminal designs combined into one ... is that what you mean by a "proper computer" (or teletype) design - one meant for use with a terminal plugged into a mainframe? And yeah, I picked my current and previous laptops partly on the strength of their screen aspect ratio. This time around, 16:10 was as good as I could find... if only I'd waited just a little longer then I'd have been just in time for the Google branded model with a 3:2, with just that little extra bit of vertical space, but this does a good enough job. I don't miss the horizontal space other than with poorly designed webpages, but the extra height is routinely welcome. Particularly it's quite good for 2-page document editing; it's not far off two old school one-page portrait monitors stuck together, and actually matches the resolution of some old 2-page landscape ones (and as a bonus is exactly 4x that of my old Atari's hi-rez, or 8x that of it's (and the Amiga plus VGA/EGA/CGA's) low rez, so emulation enjoys nice clear 2x2, 2x4 or 4x4 pixel upscaling). A wider screen would actually demand a smaller zoom %age and less readable text - and more wasted space at the sides! - because even at 1280x800 it's still the vertical dimension that dictates how much you have to shrink pages to have everything visible at once... in fact, they probably wouldn't be any bigger than when I used to try the same trick with rather more squinting on the 1024x768 predecessor (its party piece was more being flipped into tablet mode then turned portrait for full page editing with the on-screen or an external keyboard). The ideal would still be more towards 1280x960 or even 1280x1024 though (also a very good rez for portrait use on desktop screens, as it retains a decent width to go with the enhanced height, and makes both word processing and web browsing much more comfortable even with the loss of effective Cleartype... whereas a lot of things don't like 800 any more, and fewer still 768), especially with the Ribbon infestation suffered by modern applications. Quite why Microsoft decided to implement something that massively compromises your vertical resolution just as everything went widescreen is anyone's guess. If you want a fun time, try using a post-ribbon version of Powerpoint on a netbook ... a later 1024x600 (or 1024x576...) model is barely usable, an earlier 800x480 one is damn near impossible. As for the smart speaker thing... I don't get it. It seems like a triumph of pure marketing over any kind of substance...
These machines do match the description of dull beige boxes but I do like a lot of features from these cases such as the battery compartment and easy access to expansion slots. It is a shame that other manufacturers never took that idea and ran with it.
When I worked at Dixons in the early days of my working career, I was in charge of the computer area of our local Dixons shop. The Amstrad 1512 and 1640 always seemed to attract the older generation of computer users. I'm not surprised that "Doris" was a user being a popular name of yesterday's generation. The users of a Canon Starwriter word-processor would want more from their machine and an Amstrad would seem to be the next logical step. Unfortunately, however the repairs/returns area of our stockroom were always littered with Amstrad products and the sales team at the time would dread selling their products, knowing that in a few weeks time the buyer would be walking angrily back through the shop doors.
The PC1640 was my first PC, it was a hand-me-down from my uncle when he upgraded to a Pentium 60 (one hell of a leap!). It had two 5.25" floppies, a colour enhanced display "ED" monitor, and a Seagate 32MB hard drive mounted on a ISA card in the back along with it's own dedicated controller. This was during the predominantly 486+ era it was frustratingly slow but taught me a lot about getting along with few resources that has served me well. We later acquired a 2nd PC1640, this one with a lower resolution "CD" monitor but it had a double-density 3.5" floppy drive. Which again gave me envy of those with huge High Density drives! One day a filesystem corruption event caused a directory to link back to the drive root and my attempt to recursively delete it caused catastrophic data loss from which it never recovered. We soon upgraded to a 486 and those old and broken Amstrads we destined for the tip. But that slow spin-up sound is still etched into my conscious and I do miss it, especially knowing I could now fix every problem it had in my sleep.
YES! I've been looking forward to this one! Over here in the United States, my first PC clone was my grandfather's PC1512DD (upgraded to 640k, no less!). It replaced my Color Computer 2 in 1991 where I had just gotten into the world of BBSing on a 300 baud. You can imagine what an upgrade it was switching over to this machine even though its modem was still only 1200 baud. I eventually upgraded it to a 2400 baud modem, added a 40 meg IDE hard card (had a Conner drive on it), and a Media Vision Thunderboard! I went from this machine to a 486 in 1992, the first machine I ever built. Oh, I wish I still had that Amstrad! Looking forward to watching this video! (On a side note, Prodigy would only run in black-and-white on CGA machines, but Prodigy took advantage of the Amstrad's graphics giving it glorious, brilliant color LOL)
I always depends on subtitles when view other youtube channels, but your crystal clear, steady voices trully helps me as non native speaker...
Love it. Great video.
Thanks for this episode, the 1512 was my first computer, lots of fond memories from this exceptional machine!
Thanks so much for this review - the 1640 was the first IBM-compatible PC I got to use here in Australia (everyone I knew had C64s before my cousins bought their Amstrad). We went on to buy our own Amstrad 3-286, and this led to the career in I.T. that I still work in today
Another great video - thank you. Was really surprised to see you mention GEM window environment - I remember using it on an IBM PC back in the day.
I had one of these as a kid, it helped me forge a lifelong career in the IT and high tech industry, without access to DOS, GEM and the PC architecture to mess around with and learn from I’d probably have left school at 16 with only a handful of CSEs and good intentions. The experience I had of PCs because of the Amstrad meant that I got a PC support job when school leavers generally only had BBC micro knowledge. Schools didn’t have PCs and Macs then and the syllabus for computers covered BASIC programming and if you were lucky a bit of assembler. In today’s age when you can get more power in something the size of a thumb drive it all seems a bit quaint but for its day it was a thing you aspired too as the gateway into serious machines affordable to home users. Cheers Alan, you did good.
I remember upgrading my 1512 with an NEC V30 CPU which was pin compatible 8086 replacement that you just popped into the CPU socket. It was only about 15% faster but cost just £7 at the time (approx 1990).
I did the same to my 1640 added a v30 & math co processor, external 3.5 floppy, internal 40mb HDD, serial mouse and IBM style replacement keyboard .. it cost a small fortune :)
I worked for Amstrad starting from October 1990 in the PC Helpdesk department to start off with , we had a 1640 with 2 hard drives hanging off the side of it and the ribbon cables going through the side expansion plate impressive what you could do with one if you had the money. I specialised in amongst other things the "Amstrad Network" which was pretty good and cheap .. my final day was April 1996 when i took redundancy from the R&D department in the PC Division were we had been developing all the newer pcs from the PC6000 range onwards. Great times and still my favourite time at work!
Thank you for a great video. Loved it
Ah the 1512! Such memories! What a trip down memory fantastic stuff Neil!
I used to program for a living in turbo basic and turbo C on these two systems.
I see you're making good use of the new cave space. Good stuff.
Another excellent produced and researched video from RMC. Brilliant stuff. I remember these computers well, but I didn't realise the history of them regarding bring down the prices or other PCs.
I'm from Australia. My first computer was a C64 but sadly that was stolen. My next computer was an Amstrad PC1512 CGA with a single drive. It really felt like a downgrade for graphics and sound but I still had a lot of fun and must have spent thousands of hours on it, mostly playing games but also learning DOS and BASIC. There was a DOS image viewer called CSHOW that had support for the Amstrad 16 colour mode but I mostly suffered with CGA 4 colours. I later upgraded to dual floppy drives and then a 20MB HD and 640KB of RAM. I bought a 1200 baud external modem and discovered the BBS world. My uncle gave me his 1640 when he got a 386. I bought a null modem cable and linked up my Amstrad PCs for multiplayer fun.
It's undeniable that the expansion slot area is so easily accessible. Kinda neat that the monitor baseplate is recessed on top of the pc case.
At the time I had a CPC464 with floppy drive and printer. When I looked into the Amstrad PC models I had to take into account that my wife wanted to play games, and that the CPC was not much use for writing novels, my main reason for upgrading from a ZX Sectrum. After comparing models I bought an Amiga 500 over an Atari ST. With the extra drive, ram, and a colour monitor, it was still cheaper, and I could use my Amstrad printer as well. I wrote several novels and a pile of short stories in the Amiga, and contributions to a lot of newsletters. It was also ideal for personal and business letters as I could save, reload, and modify the contents without having to retype the whole letter. Not a big thing now, but I first started writing on a portable typewriter (Degree thesis), where what you see is what you're stuck with. Excellent video, thanks.
Functions keys on the left was standard for PC/XTs which I believe are about what Amstrad made. They went on top of the keyboard later with the IBM AT.
Good point well spotted. There are other oddities about it though to make it just different enough to avoid those scary IBM lawyers
@@RMCRetro Just few minor diffs: alt was next to ctrl in the middle row, prtscr after ] and not bellow Enter, L shaped Enter, shorter backspace and delete between = and backspace, caps was next to right shift and there was gap between num and main keyboard. Num had enter, shorter + and - was in the top row next to shorter scrlock.
There is also a IBM Model F AT keyboard with the function keys on the left. There were some other IBM clone keyboards that did have ten function keys on top before IBM made _twelve_ function keys on top standard with the Model M "IBM Enhanced Keyboard". BTW. Commodore PC:s had keyboards with the same layout as Amstrad's (but not as cheaply made ...)
@@FindecanorNotGmail First Commodore PC models had keyboards similar to Amstrad (except for the Num keyboard - top row was esc, numlock, scrlock, sysreq; no enter, big + and there was */prtscr above -). PC-1 and Colt had Alt and Caps in the Space key row, with same Num as previous models.
My YTS course involved setting up and testing Amstrad PC's including the 1512 and 1640, On occasions we got the PCW 8256 and 8512, PPC laptops and 286 models. This introduced me to PC repair and engineering which is still my career today. Great times.
We had a 1640 in 1988. It was a solid PC for the money, but that fan noise was almost unbearable! I remember it was slightly faster than most entry-level PCs at the time, so you really did get a lot for your money. Ended up selling it after about 6 months and bought an Amiga!
we bought one as myself and father had a small business electrical company , we got lotus and various other programmes and it worked for us for about five years keeping books writing up my course work as an engineer i can remember spending a lot of time removing the side strips to the dot matrix printed documents !!
My late mum who was a Fleet St journalist and a writer had the two locoscript machines especially as the Daily Mail utilised these making uploading of articles and work back then almost seamless, she also had the portable version which was extremely rugged but somewhat temperamental not enjoying running from a caravan or power adaptor outside its native 240v and in the end forced me dad to spend out quite a bit getting a mains power inverter fitted to the holiday caravan and just went with one of her desktop Amstrad's. They were almost indestructible the amount of punishment they took especially the keyboard which after a few months at a 80wpm touch typist lost all their lettering and took some serious pounding of the keys and lasted many years :)
Great video Neil. Put together and produced spot on again 😎👍 Funny thing is... being so young I knew nothing about IBM compatibles until I went to secondary school and there were 386's, the harddrive concept blew me away too.
Great work as usual. And the music...
My father bought a PC1512 HD20 in France in 1987. He installed a Kertel 1200 bauds modem for the Minitel access. It was great to see Minitel pages in color, while all my friends got the standard B&W minitel terminal. I also remember that it was faster than our previous IBM 5150, for games and even to display a simple « dir » dos command.
Another great video. I remember my friend bought one. I think he saved up for it from part time jobs (I think we were just finishing 5th or 6th form in the 80s) We both went into town (Manchester) and I'm pretty sure he got it from Lewis's and it cost a fortune as he got the 20Mb HD and printer. I have memories of round his playing the original 'Test Drive' most of the time. I've got a boxed one in the loft here. Not tried it in years, It's sat next to the Amstrad Mega PC with monitor and all accessories - I'm keeping hold as they are pretty damn rare.
this was my first pc. was given to me by my father after he updated. i had one with hercules graphics card and 20mb harddive. i loved it and learned programming in turbo pascal. i enjoyed it so much !
Turbo Pascal. That brought back memories. I remember programming on that on an old 386
@@spankysmp pretty sure it was this machine...
I worked on the Master Care contract to fix these Amstrad PCs from day one. No lie, Amstrad PCs changed the world more than IBM. They were everywhere. For the first time businesses could afford PCs for every desk, not just one IBM in the corner. They were networked running on Novell and Windows for Workgroups and were cheaper than new dumb terminals for the main office systems so with emulation cards or emulation software the switched from being dumb terminals to word processors and back. Suddenly every estate agent, software house, taxi office, shop, secretary, and boss had one. I don't get why they are dismissed as not cracking the business market as they created the business PC market - at least in the UK. For every one Opus, Tandon, IBM, Compaq or Olivetti PC sold Amstrad would sell ten. When in Hong Kong during the world CPU and Processor shortage I went to the famous Golden Mile and all I saw were hundreds of Amstrads with Chinese character sets being drawn on screen (at quite a very slow speed). Truly Amstrad changed the business world. However, I hated them. Your plastic gloves to keep your hands clean are fine but you should wear Kevlar gloves as some of the RF shielding foils will cut your fingers off. We used to get call outs from Amstrad to peoples homes, and they would not be in. Or they would show us to a microwave or video recorder. All for the £16 per year paid for the Mastercare scheme. The reliability issues came later with the 286 Amstrads. Earlier models mostly had the Tandon drives or plug in drive and controller on an expansion card. My word, they were slow. The CP/M systems they often replaced were often faster. You could read DIRectory listings as they scrolled down the screen. I have to admire that Sugar guy. He certainly new what he was doing.
We had a PC1640 DD as our first "family PC" after a Commodore 128 bought earlier which was ultimately only used for playing games. The Amstrad was bought circa 1988 with EGA color monitor, 5 1/4" and an extra "aftermarket" 3 1/2" drive instead of a second 5 1/4" one fitted by the seller. It served very well and was a workhorse for word processing. No more mis-printed characters because of pesky Commodore printer interface problems! I also remember playing a lot of Sierra Online's early PC adventure games on it in full EGA color. Space Quest 1+2 and LSL ftw! Circa 1993, I fitted a NEC V30 processor for the supposed 20% better speed, an original 8-bit Soundblaster card I got for free because the amplifier chip was broken (and easily changed) and also a "XT-IDE" ISA-card because I got a lot of 40 MB IDE HDDs for free (!) from my former employer while refurbishing Fujitsu-Siemens PCs with Xenix for the former "START" travel agency network. Literally carved out space for the 40 MB 3 1/2" HDD in the plastic case under the disc drive. Put GeoWorks on it and got extremely nice WYSIWYG printouts even with a lowly 9-needle dot matrix printer. You only had to be patient because the printer would print 4 times over each "row" to get the nice look. At this time, we already had a 486-66 running Windows 3.1 with an 120 MB HDD, but the above "Refurbishment" prolonged the service life of the old Amstrad considerably. The machine lived on with my aunt who used it (and GeoWorks) for word processing well into the 2000s. Sadly, she gave it away sometime when moving house. Would be very nice to have it back now, just for fun and the memories...
Particularly good reporting on this one, Neil. I imagine the 11 people who clicked dislike probably owned shares in Commodore and Atari.
All these Amstrad PC's take me back to high school (late 80's early 90's) and then IT training after that. Hearing about WordStar and WordPerfect had me in my early teens again. I'd so love to go back haha!
Thank you for this video! Apart from being a nice overview of a PC-clone I'd never heard of (in the Netherlands, at least in my circle of friends and school mates nobody had an Amstrad as far as I know), it finally solved a big mystery I had for years: I've reverse-engineered the code to Rick Dangerous 2 PC version (and created an SDL clone), and it had these mysterious scancode checks in the keyboard routine I couldn't pinpoint. Turns out it's the Amstrad keyboard joystick scancodes 0x77-0x7C! Oh, one minor nitpick: the (standard) EGA definitely wasn't Hercules compatible, though the Paradise EGA chip might've been, I don't know.
I was given a 1512 and later a 1640 (with massive 10mb hard drive) in 1995. This started my obsession for building PC's. Fantastic nostalgia from this video, cheers for that.
I studied in University of Hull when the 1512 came out, so I bought the cheapest one, one floppy and mono screen. Some modifications where done: first changing the processor to a NEC V30 (20% speedup) and a 20GB harddisk on a card. Next I changed the diskcontroller from MFM to RLL (upping the storage to 32GB). Then I maxed the ram to 640KB. Next I changed the processor crystal from a 24MHz to a 27MHz (a common RC crystal, easy to get) that gave me 9 MHz processor clock. Next step was a 34MHz RC crystal (which gave a 11.3MHz processor clock). The problem was that the floppy controller ran straight off the processor clock, and made standard floppies unreadable. A little tinkering with the clock circuit made the the CPU clock slow down when the floppydrive was used (by selecting the realtime clock crystal (?)). I was Amstrad Norways goto man for people that asked hard questions at this point. Having taken the machine to its limits I sold it to get a 486 machine... (I calculated that I actually made about £100 compared to my expenses)
This brought back lots of memories. I worked at a government youth training centre (called iTecs) and we bought about a dozen 1512's and a 1640 they all worked really well for teaching. We had the GEM system and the kids liked them. It taught them what a business system was like to work with. We upgraded some of the twin floppies to hard drives and we replaced some of the 20 meg hard drives with 40 meg drives but we had to partition them as 32 meg and 8 meg as the max hard drive size ( or partition) was 32 meg. I remember the none standard graphics mode as well which could be used for more colours on the 1640.
Lots of variants to the 2 dead boys poem/song from the floppy at 17:19 in the video. Love these videos it takes me back to my first PC's a Apple IIc and a Tandy TX1000
Had one of the PC2086Ds in the 90s, that mouse man, it's just an abomination. Also windows 2.03 running off dual floppies was a joy to behold. I did manage to get that to run on the ppc512 luggable, but on that tiny monochrome screen it was more entertaining than useful.
The 1640 was my first PC. I learned to handle it with DOS and loved to play PGA Golf. It had an issue with the power adapter and I replaced it by a 486 DX2/66.
Brilliant. Just brilliant... Nice one Neil and a great review mate🤩🤩🤩 Kim 🤩🤩 🤩
Thanks Kim!
Thanks for the video, this was fun. I had wondered what Amstrad did after the CPC range, so I feel I learned something today. Love this channel!
If you are outside of the UK you might not know that Amstrad went on to make most of the receivers for the Sky TV service before selling out to them. Nowadays Company founder Lord Alan Sugar is the main man on the UK version of The Apprentice. Unfortunately he can't be persuaded to run for Prime Minister.
Well don't forget, that in around '86 he bought Sinclair, and also carried on developing the Amstrad 'Sinclair' Spectrum line of 8-Bit home computers.... the 128K +2/+3 models were Amstrads, but still carried the Sinclair name on the casings; and great computers they are still... :-)
Oh my, do i have fond memories of those. Working in a independent computer shop we sold hundreds of these, I spent many,many hours upgrading and repairing them. so easy to work on. The 1512 I did hundreds of memory upgrades and 'hard cards' which was just a hard drive and controller all on a single metal backplane. Most of those where Tandon hard drives which you had to low level format before you could use them.
Dad threw out the machines , I accidently smashed the color monitor in 2003 when i was trying to retrieve it from the garage.. so many memories. Loom . Leisure Suit Larry, xenon 2, tetris , wow
I don't have time to watch the video right now but I will watch it sometime later. I own a PC1512 SDCM since 1987. The only upgrade I made was a Creative Labs sound blaster card in 1992. I think it's still working. I will never sell it. That was my first ever PC.
i was more of a c64 and later an amiga guy, always looked at these amstrads as a more high end business machine, but i love all these old systems.. tech seemed more magical and wonderous back then
I agree that computers seemed more magical back then. I recall that my friend and I were avid readers of magazines like Your Computer, and we would often joke about "what new computer would be launched THIS month". Ahhh, those were happy times.
exactly.. it felt like every extra few mhz or mb more was a technological leap into the future.
In Germany These were sold under the „Schneider“-brand. I had the PC1512DD back in the late 90s, when the CRT died. I unfortunately dumped the whole machine. Wish I‘d still have it…
Thank you so much. Our History is a major part of our life that we should not forget, for respect to ourselves. 😊
Yay I remember this well - our first household PC! Had a CPC before, just can't remember for certain which model!
I used to be the goto-man on the amstrad pcs in Norway. Amstrad Norway asked people with problems they had no idea how to fix to call my private number... I hacked my own 1512 with a harddisk on a card, then replaced the mfm controller on that card to RLL, then a bigger disk that replaced one of the floppies, then a NEC 30 processor, then I replaced the crystal for the processor chlock with a RC crystal at 27MHz (from the original 24MHz). Then a 45MHz (that gave the floppy-controller problems), so I put in a circuit that reduced the cpuclock when the floppy select was active. Great times!
I’m in the US and bought a 1512 for college in 1988 from an ad in the back of a magazine. Served me very well for years, until I was ready for a hard drive and Windows 95. Nice video!
The video production value is simply incredible in this one. *Thank you RetroManCave.* As always with you, _It was pleasure to view and a pleasure to learn._
Thank you for your kind words 🖒
@@RMCRetro Thank for your attention.
I had a Sound blaster 1.0 in an 1640! Also the mda screen was modded to support ega in greyscale - that looked nice!
this pc is awesome aesthetically, im in love with it now
Wonderful video Neil! The production quality and editing of this episode is some of the best I have seen on RNC. Excellent job! Are the S&M gloves new?
Thank you! I'll let you in on a secret. Sometimes I wear the gloves because of dirt. Other times it's because my cat has savaged my hands when I'm playing with her so I'm just sparing you from my wounds 😂
Great Work!
Thank you Vasco
Great video, excellent choice of music.
Very fond memories as the 1512 was my first PC. My dad bought it for the family business - newsagents and grocers - and it was used for many years for the paper round databases and account billing. With the help of a family friend who was a programmer, I wrote a home-project version of the news software in C. I also wrote my school homework on it, which impressed my teachers no end with my printed essays. As for games, I spent hours playing a host of text and ascii adventures - who remembers "Jacarnda Jim" by Graham Cluley, or the dungeon game Rogue? How about the side scroller "Sopwith"? Most notably, I enjoyed opening up the case and poking around inside, which inspired my 30 year interest in PC hardware tinkering. Great video and thanks for the trip back in time!
My parents bought a 1512 in '86 and it was indeed our first computer at home. I remember learning my first development skills with Locomotive BASIC to develop a text-based "adventure game", as I was super fond of gamebooks that were popular back then. I also used it to draw using Paint, and therefore will always remember these frustrating rectangular pixels! Good memories... Thanks for this video!!
I like how they hacked around the CGA adapter to fit in 3 different character sets for the different parts of the Europe, as it was US-centered, and did not support loadable characters.
Mine was an Schneider PC1520 HD with colour monitor. Upgraded to 640 MB and powered by a V30 CPU with 10 MHz she was the fastest on the block. She was my first IBM compatible PC and I was a bit anxious back then to modify the CPU's clock frequency - but it worked. From then on I built all of my computers by myself. I even managed to get a job as a computer service engineer thanks to my studies with, in, and on this machine.
love the new feel, different sets, lenght is good, music is also better, still some work to be done with timelapse video, but great work!
Thank you! I've been working on a new Trash to Treasure today and it feels like it's starting to gel with the new space. Glad you're enjoying it
@@RMCRetro A lot and waiting for my favorite Trash to Treasure!!
Working from the late 70s building pcs for a company who built those pcs for Reuters (int news agency) soldering boards, acousitc cleaning and assembling / tech checks et AND my wife being a programmer (Cobol) working for a huge logistics company as a programmer/supervisor/ trainer the pcs we used at home being IBM's et I was surprised when a friend of ours running his own retail store invited me over to see his computer setup et It was the Amstrad 1640 with HD and dot matrix printer. The system had its own Amstrad provided accounts proram diskette which he loaded to put together his accounts including print outs on sales / takings et Overall I was really impressed at how the system worked and the benefits he had from it at his fingertips. The color was excellent for its time and the reliability was also good. Amstrad certainly knew their game re home pcs et Great vid lotta memories here ☺☺
The indent for the monitor is a nice touch
4:52 I think the NVR Setup utility included on the system disks allows you to map the unused scancodes to more commonly available keys 12:37 The Keyboard layout is actually based on the layout of the original IBM XT Keyboard, versus the AT Layout for the new 286's and which is now what most people would probably think of as a "standard" keyboard layout. However, this is pretty ideal for the 1512/1640 since the majority of software that works well on it is, of course, going to be slower 8088 based software, and many of those programs would have originally been designed with that keyboard layout in mind. 13:07 Amstrad apparently had issues supplying enough hard drive models, so it was not uncommon for them to be upgraded with hard-cards, a ISA card concept you rarely see these days.
I’ve been waiting patiently for this one 👍 I’ve got the 1640DD (so twin floppies) with the EGA monitor (broken!) and a full-length ISA “hardcard”, a hard disk controller with the hard drive mounted directly on it. Apparently this was an option at purchase rather than a later upgrade. I’ve altered the DIP switches on the back of the machine and added an ISA VGA card so I can plug it into a normal monitor; maybe you can do the same with the 1512? Power is your only issue there. For now, I need to keep the broken monitor close by, but I have a spare AT PSU that I’m going to modify and use at some point as an external power supply.
Interesting! The 1512 doesn't let you disable the CGA chip but that's useful to know about the dip switches on the 1620. An LCD with a PSU mounted in a CRT case 😂
RetroManCave That’s my eventual plan, to find an LCD that will fit inside the original monitor’s case. There’ll be plenty of room in there for the converted PSU. 👍
Gentlemen, on this page you can find information about the PSU connector: www.seasip.info/AmstradXT/1512tech/section1.html The PSU connector is at the very bottom of that page.
It was a cool system but I had not much software to play with and the mono display like yours. My favourite part was that keyboard!
Love the sound those old MFM & RLL hard disks make. Stepper motors are so much nicer than the voice coils that replaced them in more modern drives.
My 20Mb drive ultimately needed to be warmed up with a hair drier before it would boot lol
It was the first PC I worked on, after one year replaced by an IBM PS2 computer. It was a great computer for the time.
My family's first computer was an Amstrad PC1640, while it had some issues the first couple months we owned it, eventually it got sorted out (bad HDD, we ended up getting a 40mb Western Digital drive instead of a 20mb stock drive), and it lasted from 1988 until 2005 when the keyboard busted.
I still have some of these old MFM controllers and disks floating around. Fairly certain I have one of those Tandon drives. Havn't spun any of them up in a long time.
I borrowed a PC1512 for a few months circa 1989 - double floppy version with a monochrome monitor. I can remember having some video problems - characters would flicker in coloured text applications for several minutes after power-up. GEM wasn't that much use, and the bundled DOS+ even less so. The mouse was also a bit odd - one of the mouse buttons was mapped to Enter IIRC. Never tried anything with the joystick, but I did have once game that worked in the 1512's 16-colour mode - Millennium 2.2
Thanks for another excellent video. I moved from the UK to USA in 1986, so never got to take advantage of the low priced Amstrad. Bought my first PC in 1988, a no-name 286 with 640K RAM and EGA graphics. Cost me me $1800 for PC, monitor and printer, a chunk of change in those days.