Amstrad Advert - December 1991

It's been five years since Amstrad purchased the name and marketing rights to Sinclair's computers, having moved into the computer business a couple of years before with its CPC range of budget home micros.

It continued to sell a range of highly-succesful home micros and word processors before eventually - and inevitably, given where the market was going - moving into business machines.

This is another in that range of businessey IBM PC-compatibles, in this case based around the Intel 80386SX - a cheaper cut-down version of the 80386 with a 16-bit data bus and a 24-bit internal memory bus.

It was also one of several machines released at the time that were pitched as tiny PCs, partly to target home users, but also in a reaction against the sometime-enormous boxes that took up most of the desktop they lived on.

It was also the time when the market seemed - for a while at least - to be drifting towards "network workstations" which didn't need much in the way of power or expansion.

This one was definitely tiny, and even came with a tiny 10" monitor - only 1" bigger than the original PET 2001 of 1977. It retailed for £1,699 + VAT, or about £5,550 in 2026.

A few months before in the early summer of 1991, Amstrad made 41 of its staff redundant in a cost-cutting move.

At the same time the company also announced that it was introducing a 45p-per-minute charge to use its helpline, partly because Alan Sugar reckoned that people were wasting the time of his helpline staff. Talking to Guy Kewney of Personal Computer World, Sugar said:

"If they want to spend hours on the phone, holding up other people who have problems while they slowly discuss some minute detail which is covered by the manual, that's fine, but they have to pay for it, and hopefully, some of them will be a bit quicker^[1]".

The PC 4386 did not appear to sell that well, with Personal Computer World reporting in its November 1993 edition that:

"The idea of a machine for the home user is far from new. Amstrad tried it with the tiny 4386, and IBM with the original PS/1. Both of these were limited in their success - okay, they flopped - but this, the marketers say, was down to a problem with the package and not the idea. This has the familiar ring of programmers blaming the hardware for a bug, but they may be right^[2]".

Amstrad would continue making computers for a few years more, but it eventually lost interest as it moved more into the satellite set-top box and dish market it had helped create with Sky, after the latter's launch in 1989.