Alan Sugar made a startling confession when writing the opening text for the Amstrad NC100 Notepad’s manual: “I am embarrassed to say that, as the chairman of one of Europe’s largest manufacturers of computers, I have never been able to use one!”
It was 1992 and Amstrad was indeed a huge player in the still fledgling computer market. Having entered the industry with the CPC 464 in 1984, it had introduced the popular PCW range, bought rival Sinclair, got burned in the video-game industry with the GX4000 console and launched affordable PCs including a successful series of portables.
The NC100, however, encapsulated everything Amstrad desired. The company was always talking about creating tech that focused less on what was inside and more on what could be achieved at the lowest possible price. And in making the Notepad, it had a computer that was vastly cheaper than a laptop yet provided the basics of computing – the stuff the company reckoned 80 percent of the population wanted.
Similar to the Cambridge Z88 released in 1987, it was an A4-sized, slimline notepad computer based around the ageing Z80 processor used in the CPC and PCW. Boasting just 64K of RAM and 256K of ROM, it had a letterbox LCD screen displaying 80-character columns by eight rows. It also came with a guarantee: “If you can’t use this new computer in
