Amstrad PCW

[Stephen Coates]

Just wondering if anyone here has owned/used an Amstrad PCW.

I don't really know much about them but was curious as someone is selling one in last Thursdays newspaper for £10. "Green monitor, printer, floppies and instruction book".

[Harrison]

The Amstrad PCW was not related to their CPC range of the same era and was in fact not even a full computer. It was sold as an Office computer, or word processor, and was really a cut-down PC with a custom OS that restricted it to mainly office related tasks. I always thought it a bit pointless and a waste of money back at the time, and completely pointless these days.

The actual computer was built into the monitor as an all in one system, with a separate keyboard and printer bundled with it. Most of the models used the Amstrad specific 3" floppy disks also used by later Spectrums and CPCs. And the software included Locoscript word processing program, the CP/M Plus operating system, Mallard BASIC and the LOGO programming language. CP/M was a fairly good OS at the time, and was also used on the CPC6128, but it was more restrictive on the PCW.

Whether you should grab this one for sale for £10 is up to you, but personally I think its more a museum piece than something you will really find any use for. Maybe something interesting for a computer club meeting, and for you to have a brief play around with, but ultimately it will end up as a very large paperweight collecting dust.

Also consider this came out the same year as the Amiga, and you can see how primitive and out of date it was even when new.

[Stephen Coates]

It does indeed sound a bit 'primitive' compared to the Amiga, but then, so does the IBM PC.

The particular one in the paper is a PCW 8256. I wasn't planning on buying it, as I don't really have much use for such a machine, but I am now curious to know about them as I've never really heard of them before.

[J T]

Like a ghetto iMac or something.

Take a chance and get it. You could always have a mess about with it and sell it on later, or smash it up.

[Tiago]

Thet Amstrad PCW has a Zilog Z80 as CPU .... 4 mhz, but it worked under 4mhz, about 3.4mhz...
and i think it did not have color display ...