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Comment by beschizza | Hacker News Reader

> "Most tellingly, the monitor was extremely basic (technical name: a pixel VDU) which ran on BASIC 1.0; a programming language that quite amazingly, was already 20 years old (having been first created at Dartmouth College in 1964)."

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.

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Very much this. There's lots in here about the 8-bit era which is just plain wrong.

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.

Came here to say the same about the CPC price.

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)

PCWs were pretty decent word processing machines in their time, IMHO. We had an 8256 and a 9512 when I was a kid and they were surprisingly nice to use. I still remember the clatter of the daisywheel printer fondly.

Glad to hear this take. I had a Spectrum and my friend had an Amstrad.

Whilst they had some stuff in common due to Amstrad buying Sinclair research, the graphics capabilities on the Amstrad seemed more advanced.

The Speccy was great, but yes the Amstrad graphics were better. Not because they were anything spectacular, but because the Spectrum suffered from colour clash.

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.

> 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

I'm not sure I understand why devices weren't coming with plugs back then but I remember it - and in the 90s was taught to wire a plug in school.

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.

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