Hail the 464 ! Hail Sugarman ! Power to the People !

The first in a range of home computers sold by Amstrad, the CPC464 brought some welcome realism into the home computer market of the early eighties. It equaled or exceeded the technical abilities of competitors' machines in every area, and came bundled (this was the killer) with a colour monitor, all for 399 pounds. At the time of launch, punters (as Alan Sugar would call them) were being asked to pay the same for a monitorless, tapeless, BBC Micro with half the RAM.

Overnight, the 464 outspecced and undercut all competing machines, bar none. While Acorn went bust and Sinclair were gobbled up by Amstrad, the 464 sold in quadrazillions and allowed Amstrad to dominate the home computer market and (subsequently) the small business PC market.

The 464 was equiped with a 4 Mhz Z80 processor and Locomotive Basic 1.1, which made it the fastest and most structured programming platform in the home computer market. It had a dedicated 3 channel sound chip and noise generator, a pallete of 27 colours, the ability to display 80 column text, and more useable RAM (44 Kb) than any of its competitors. These things were important at the time!

There was no shortage of games for the 464. Since it used the same processor as the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, most popular Spectrum games were simply ported.

I spent years programming and gaming on my 464. I liked its technical excellence, low price and practicality. I liked the way that Amstrad exploded the pretence and pedantry which had become a part of the home computer scene at the time. The CPC464 encapsulated the greatest strengths of competing systems in one cheap box. Nice one Alan!

CPU: Zilog Z80A@4mhz
RAM: 64KB (42KB available to user)
ROM: 32KB
Storage: A 2000 baud max cassette drive was built into the system
Sound: AY-3-8912 producing 3 sound channels(8 octaves) and 1 white noise channel
Ports: Printer port (7-bit), Expansion bus edge connector, Joystick port, Amstrad DIN monitor socket, stereo headphones socket (with volume knob)
Graphics:640 x 200 (2 colours), 320 x 200 (4 colours), 160 x 200 (16 colours) 27 total colours
Text Modes: 20 x 25 (16 colors) 40 x 25 (4 colors) 80 x 25 (2 colors)

I received an Amstrad CPC 464, my first computer, as a christmas present at the age of 8.

I was initially somewhat disappointed, I had asked for a computer due to playing on a relative's Amiga 500 and the graphics and sound of the CPC464 were somewhat underwhelming. There was of course a reason for this; my relative's parents were rich, mine were not. Valiantly holding back any negative emotions I thanked my parents and proceeded to play Chase HQ, concentrating intensely on the greenscreen monitor that had been set up on the kitchen table.

My parents acquired the machine second hand and as such it came with a big box of games, everything from Batman to Spy Hunter via Jet Set Willy. I did have a fair amount of fun, although the lack of colour monitor was annoying. It was a decent enough microcomputer, if you put aside issues which applied to almost all microcomputers of the time such as tape drives which loaded a game properly about 30% of the time and tapes that tended to be corrupted if you looked at them the wrong way.

Physically the CPC464 looked like a black keyboard designed by cubists, with a tape drive built into the end. It had the bizarre multi-coloured keys seemingly endemic to microcomputers of this era, what the colours represented was never explained to me. The monitor was the same colour and essentially a square chunk of plastic, although still a lot better looking than BBC monitors.

When turned on the CPC 464 went straight to a BASIC prompt, this was Locomotive BASIC, although the text initially above the prompt claimed it to be Amstrad BASIC.

Sadly I wanted more and 2 years later got the Amiga 500 (with 1MB ram upgrade:) I'd wanted to begin with (prices had come down somewhat in the intervening period).

Some technical details from Old-Computers.com >http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=84