Amstrad Emailer, the UK’s first smartphone
mulebritannia.substack.com
mulebritannia.substack.com
As fun as it is, this article exemplifies the trend of people writing snarkily about subjects they know little about. This sentence alone has at least four factual errors in it!
- The monitor was not "tellingly" basic and it isn't remarkable that it was a "pixel VDU". The author is perhaps mangling a remark from Chris Hall in an old Register article making clear for modern readers that it was just a CRT in a box.
- The monitor (!) did not run Basic.
- The Amstrad's Basic was Locomotive Basic, a relatively advanced and powerful dialect, not "Basic 1.0"
- Basic was created in 1963. It was published in 1964.
The CPC was absolutely not an "impulse buy price point". It was several times the price of a ZX Spectrum, which was a much more "compromised" device than the CPC. Amstrad's marketing trick was to sell an all-in-one, non-toy system at an affordable price that didn't tie up the TV. Put simply, the CPC appealed to the parents who were paying for the computer, not the kids who were badgering for it.
When he says "many devices still required purchasers to undertake their own wiring, and sometimes even solder on their own plug", that's not at all the case. The kit computer in the UK died years earlier with the ZX81. Fitting plugs yourself was not uncommon in the 80s, but no soldering was required.
All manner of fascinating stuff in Amstrad history. e.g. the 3" disc drive (not 3.5") Seemingly he found a cheap supply - so we got them on the spectrum, CPC and the PCW.
A PCW was what my father brought home from a computer fair, instead of the anticipated Amiga or PC. Even more integrated than the CPC with computer & drives built into the monitor and shipping with a printer. A predecessor of the iMac (made in a hell-dimension)
Whilst they had some stuff in common due to Amstrad buying Sinclair research, the graphics capabilities on the Amstrad seemed more advanced.
In summary, the foreground and background colour (known as the attributes) could only be set at a resolution of an 8x8 block of pixels - so every pixel in each 8x8 block had to share the same colours.
This meant for example that as a yellow sprite entered the same 8x8 block as a green thing, then when the code set the colour attributes to yellow (for the sprite) the green thing turned yellow too.
The opening seconds of this video [1] show it pretty clearly.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PI6GwKVAeY
Disclaimer (which I feel appropriate given the old school playground wars about which was the best platform): I had a CPC464 which I loved and still run emulated, but also often went round to mate's houses for Speccy gaming too.
Ahhhh. I had a friend with weird a BBC setup and an EEPROM programmer. I had a friend with a Commodore 64 (which, graphically, was on another level from anything else I'd seen with a keyboard).
And, yes, I had a friend with an Amstrad CPC (and one with their weird hybrid PC / Megadrive).
Only a few years later my school was burgled and the BBC Micros were stolen. They got Acorns as replacements but, if anything, we were probably allowed less time on them than the Beebs shrug
At some stage devices had to start coming with plugs attached, I think with legal force.
The UK did still have quite a few installations of the old round pin plugs in use, so maybe those had to go out of circulation first.
My parents got one around when I went to university. It was a really good fit for them and helped us keep in touch. Main benefits:
* It did its job - a light showed up when you had something to read, otherwise you don't. * Always-on, no boot time. * It fit on the kitchen worktop, whereas PCs took up a lot of space. * The predictable schedule of dialing up, retrieving e-mail and then disconnecting let them know what their costs would be, even if they were a bit higher than the (variable) costs of normal PC internet use. * It had good contacts storage (with dockable electronic address book you could take away), at a time when you would still expect to be managing a list of telephone numbers on a piece of paper.
All for less than a PC. They could have got all the same things out of the PC, the Em@iler just put it in more convenient package.
What have we got now? When I look up the UKs biggest tech companies now its people like Aveva and Sage who make dull enterprisey software. Is there anyone else?
edit: I guess we might still have some big game studios?
edit: I'll also take websites, has the UK got any big website companies? Seems like our biggest are Rightmove and Autotrader
(Admittedly, that list is using a definition of 'startup' broad enough to include the UK's second-largest energy supply company)
There was Microfocus: https://www.microfocus.com/en-us/home They owned SuSE at one time. But MicroFocus now have owners outside the UK.
And there was Autonomy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Autonomy Bought by HP, leading to lots of controversy and legal wrangling when they did get what they had expected.
I guess it's a migration path for people getting rid of big iron but unable or uninterested in getting rid of the code they ran.
We've got Creative Assembly (owned by Japan-based Sega), Rockstar North (previously DMA Design and founded the GTA series, now owned by US-based Rockstar ofc), Jagex (owned by a US PE company), and a whole host of others mostly now owned by US companies.
There's a piece of wisdom floating around that the UK is actually really good at building tech and tech-adjacent companies, bu really bad at scaling them beyond a certain point. We don't have the BigTech companies China and the US do (nobody does, really), but we're a pretty open economy that American firms are comfortable doing business with, so lots of promising companies get acquired before they hit _big_.
Definitely deserves a mention as it at least has quite big mind share.
And Frontier: https://www.frontier.co.uk/ Who develop various games including, possibly most famously in these circles, Elite Dangerous.
Graphcore. Semiconductor company doing accelerators for machine learning, based in Bristol. Raised $200m at a $1.7bn valuation in 2018.
EDIT2: There's also XMOS in Bristol, which has taken about $100m in funding over the years, but have no idea what their valuation is like. Also (fabless) semiconductor company that seems to have sort-of pivoted towards AI acceleration similar to Graphcore.
> edit: I'll also take websites, has the UK got any big website companies? Seems like our biggest are Rightmove and Autotrader
Hopin (virtual events; raised about $1bn)
Cazoo (online car sales; about 2k employees)
Deliveroo (food delivery; market cap of about 1.6bn)
Snyk is now apparently Boston based, but was founded in London (cybersecurity); this is a common issue for the European startup space, but perhaps especially so for the UK since startups here tends to target English-speaking markets from the start, in that the incentive to move the companies to the US are pretty significant.
Revolut, sort of. Bank license in Lithuania, founders are Russian and Ukrainian, but headquartered in London.
EDIT: Babylon Health. "Online first" healthcare provider offering both NHS and private GP services via app/video as the first instance (with offline facilities to complement with face to face examinations when needed). About 2k employees; took about $550m funding at a $2bn valuation in 2019
"Revolut, sort of. Bank license in Lithuania, founders are Russian and Ukrainian, but headquartered in London."
-
On a serious note: can we determine if any of the Ukranian AIDE went into / through this 'bank'?
The City Of London is the money laundering capital - with all their insturments pointing to the companies/countries of the Panama Papers and the other laundering/tax evasion scandals....
The only ones are Dyson and perhaps ARM which are the long lasting ones the UK has made.
Monzo, Wise, Starling and Deliveroo are the latest 2010 cohort the UK has made and that’s about it.
The latter cohort may die out or get acquired by FAANG or run out of money and shut down.
Compared to the US, the UK keeps selling their companies abroad rather than acquiring them. The US keeps creating more and more successful tech companies.
Once ARM chose to IPO in the US I knew it was completely over.
Even the LSE is part owned by the US (Microsoft), the UK is slowly giving away their technological sovereignty, not exactly the tech world leaders they keep saying they are.
It is a real shame.
Yes thats a good way of putting it
* Renishaw. Precision measurement and manufacturing. * Spectris. Scientific instruments. Precision components. * Oxford Instruments. All sorts of high-tech stuff used in science and research
Rolls Royce aerospace is pretty cool. There are some defence related companies that do tech stuff. Radar, guidance systems, battlefield comms, that sort of thing. Formula One tech is mostly British. MclLaren, Red Bull Racing, Mercedes are all UK based.
Random recollections.
The codename at Atari was BSI which IIRC stood for Bob's Stupid Idea
The screen was a disaster. There was a mismatch between the lcd and it's controller, so it could only be persuaded to provide three distinguishable shades. I had to bastardize our Floyd Steinberg ditherer into working with this.
There was a production crunch deadline which lead to them being shipped from manufacturing (in China?) with a bad image. Every box then had to be opened and every device reflashed (no OTA updates back then)
I'll see if anyone else has any good recollections...
Looking back, my big regret was not trying harder to get C++ working. Having the compiler automatically insert unlock calls via a destructor function would have saved me a lot of time and screaming "Why are you still locked?" at the screen.
The article mentions that people would buy the emailer and not use the email capability.
It was a decent phone in it's own right with built in voicemail (at the time a lot of people still had tape based voicemail "ansaphone™") which displayed missed calls and voicemails on the screen
We may have been the first product to show an integrated inbox between phone and email, although again my memory is fuzzy
I really find it fascinating how they had their own little market, industry and culture/ecosystem that seems to have spawned many modern companies like ARM, Raspberry Pi, etc, despite the overwhelming dominance of US and international heavyweights that captured most of the related markets during the 2000-2010s.
Originally broadcast 1982. That's basically the contemporary coverage as it was happening.
It's a bit forceful but it tells you clearly exactly what you need to do to have a good experience. Given the setup was presumably a bit fiddly this seems much better than having customers get frustrated before resorting to the manual.