How Sugar spiced up the PC market
For an intense period in the mid-1980s, Amstrad was on fire. It had already built a reputation as a budget British manufacturer of low-priced, all-in-one hi-fi systems festooned with buttons and sliders. Now Alan Sugar’s company was making a huge noise in the computing industry, and competitors were looking over their shoulders.
Amstrad entered the computer market in 1984 with the 8-bit CPC 464. It was a 64K machine with a built-in cassette drive that came with its own monitor – an early all-in-one, if you will, powered via a single plug. The following year, it released two disk-based CPCs (the 664 and 6128) and launched the PCW range, primarily dedicated to word processing and bundled with a printer.
Yet the computer that arguably made the biggest impact was the PC1512 – a clone of another company’s machine. Released 35 years ago and code-named AIRO (Amstrad’s IBM Rip Off), it proved revolutionary. “We picked the right time and we kickstarted the market,” Lord Sugar told PC Pro, recalling how this PC became the catalyst for Amstrad seizing an eventual 25% share of the European computer market.
By the time the
