Amstrad Advert - September 1985

Many computer companies of the time seemed to be happy to rely on third parties to produce peripherals for their machines, particularly Acorn which was famous for its long timescales in developing anything beyond the BBC/Proton^[1], although there were a few relatively few high-end and specialist add-ons it was known for, like its Prestel and Teletext adapters.

Sinclair had produced the Interface 1 and 2, as well as Microdrives (the Interface was a requirement to plug in a Microdrive, which the advert has a dig at), a modem and the ZX Printer, but at least it had a whole ecosystem of hundreds of companies producing everything else, not least real keyboards for the ZX80, 81 and Spectrum.

Commodore put in a reasonable showing, producing more than most with floppy disk drives, joysticks, modems and printers, but Amstrad raised the bar by seemingly - almost out of nowhere - producing everything going, with their background in consumer electronics seeming to really show through.

This advert even includes a CP/M disk-drive module, much like the ZEP100 produced for the BBC by Torch, as well as light pens, a speech synthesizer (Acorn did produce a voice synthesizer in the form of a plug-in chip, featuring the voice of newsreader Kenneth Kendall), an RS-232 interface, joysticks and a proper printer.

Perhaps it wasn't so much that other companies didn't produce all this stuff for their micros, as many did over time, but that Amstrad seemed capable of making them available all at once for each of their new machines, as soon as they were launched.

It's no wonder they were about the only micro company making profits in 1985^[2].

Spreadsheets as pop art: Microspread in action, from Practical Computing, April 1985

The release of Amstrad's £159 (about £630 in 2026) disk drive, which was becoming more readily available by the early spring of 1985, appeared to mark a shift in focus for the CPC-464, which was previously regarded as a "home enthusiast's machine".

Shortly afterwards, Amstrad's software arm - Amsoft - released a large number of disk-based software packages for the machine, including not just games, but educational software as well as "several serious packages".

The new packages included the word processor Microscript and a database called Micropen - both retailing at £49 (£190) - whilst Amsoft also announced details of a forthcoming full acountancy suite from Quest International, in addition to its existing £49 Microspread and the simplerMastercalc, at £29.95^[3].