Amstrad Advert - August 1986

It's another advert for Amstrad's P‍CW 8256, featuring a rubbish-tip metaphor that occured in a few of the adverts run around this time.

The P‍CW 8256 and 8512 were hugely successful in the UK market, and were often credited with being the machine that finally "got the technophobes in to computers".

An advert for the PC‍W 8256 on a similar theme, with a skip full of junked computer equipment. From Personal Computer World, October 1986

Such was the impact of Amstrad's machine that Guy Kewney wrote in May 1986's Personal Computer World that:

"Sagesoft reports that in three short months, its software sales for the Amstrad range have reached the half-million pound mark. The P‍CW8256 has literally turned the market upside down, and among the new business programs pouring out of the software houses, Caxton's new spreadhseet, Scratchpad Plus at £70, and Sagesoft's own Chat-Chat, are selling in the kind of numbers that previously were only possible in the IBM PC market of three years ago. Sagesoft isn't the only software house to find that Amstrad is an important part, suddenly, of its portfolio. Digital Research, produceer of CP/M, says that in just eight weeks from a January launch, it sold 3,500 copies of DR Graph, Draw, Pascal/MT+ and CBasic^[1]".

It was also said that the machine's reliability was making it popular with distributors, with one reporting:

"The machine has excellent quality control and dealers find that they don't have to return faulty equipment the way that they do with the Spectrum and the Commodore".

By the time they were discontinued in 1998, eight million P‍CWs had been sold, with 700,000 shifting in the UK in the first two years alone^[2], making it the best-selling UK micro ever until the Raspberry Pi beat it in early 2016^[3].

The original 8256 retailed for only £399 - about £1,540 in 2024 - which was about a quarter the price of an IBM PC at the time.