amstrad PCW

2 Articles

An Amstrad PCW Receives A Bit Of Love

April 6, 2025 by 6 Comments

If Clive Sinclair’s genius in consumer electronics was in using ingenious hacks to make cheaper parts do greater things, then his Amstrad competitor Alan Sugar’s was in selling decade-old technology to consumers as new and exciting. His PCW series of computers are a great example, 1970s CP/M machines smartly marketed for late 1980s home offices. They were a popular choice at the time, and [Retro Recipes] has one. In  a video filmed in period standard definition he’s taking us through a repair to its Gotek drive, and then a RAM upgrade.

The repair and upgrade are fairly straightforward, the former being a failed OLED screen on the drive and the latter being the installation of a bank of DIP memory chips. The interest lies in how they cost-minimised a CP/M machine as a consumer product. The board relies heavily on custom chips as you might expect, and there’s a brief glimpse of one of those unusual 3″ floppy drives. The power supply is part of the monitor board as was often the case with Amstrad machines, and the whole thing is about as simple as it can be. The full video can be found below the break.

We’re guessing that particularly in the UK there will be plenty of PCWs still languishing in dusty attics, but surprisingly given their popularity at the time we see less of them that might be expected. There has been a significantly upgraded model on these pages though.

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An Amstrad PCW For The 21st Century

October 30, 2017 by 12 Comments

If you were a computer-mad teen in the late 1980s, you were probably in the process of graduating from an 8-bit machine to a 16-bit one, maybe an Amiga, or an Atari ST. For the first time though you might not have been the only computer owner in your house, because there was every chance your parents might have joined the fun with a word processor. Maybe American home offices during this period might have had PC clones, but for Brits there was every chance that the parental powerhouse would have been an Amstrad PCW.

Amstrad were the masters of packaging up slightly outdated technology for electronic consumers on a budget, and the PCW was thus a 1970s CP/M machine for the 1980s whose main attraction was that it came with monitor and printer included in the price. [James Ots]’ parents had one that interested him enough that  he has returned to the platform and is documenting his work bringing it up to date.

It was the most recent progress in booting into CP/M from an SD card by hijacking the printer ROM that caught our eye, but reading all the build logs that is only the tip of the iceberg. He’s connected another monitor, made a joystick port and a soundcard, and added a memory upgrade to his PCW. Most of these machines would have only been used with the bundled word processor, so those are real enhancements.

We’ve featured quite a few projects involving Amstrad’s CPC home computers, such as this one with a floppy emulator. Amstrad are an interesting company for followers of consumer electronics of the ’70s and ’80s, they never had the out-there tech wackiness of their great rival Sinclair but their logo could be found on an astonishing variety of appliances. The “AMS” in Amstrad are the initials of the company founder [Alan Sugar], who is rather better known in 2017 as the British host of The Apprentice. It is not known whether he intends to lead the country.