Friday, October 21, 2005

The Amstrad CPC 464


Pretty much where is all began, the Amstrad CPC 464, my first big league gadget. It's fair to say there had been others before the 464, some of which will be mentioned here soon, but they were just toys in comparison to the sheer geek factor of my first home computer.

I have my mum and dad to thank. Though they never really said so, they had to save for quite some time to be able to afford this piece of gadget history. They ordered it from a catalogue company some 6 weeks before it had even been launched, hence began the seemly agonising routine of coming home from school everyday expecting it to have arrived only to find that it hadn't.

Then, one Wednesday morning, it arrived, some 20 minutes before I was due to leave for school! I remember taking the manual to school with me and reading it through most of English and all of Maths! Ah, good times. When I got home that night I had more waiting to do, waiting for my very own computer guru to arrive - dad! With the touch of a computing demi-god dad unfolded the wonderful world of personal computing right before my very eyes, tears of joy followed. The future had arrived and it was all mine!

James

3 Comments:

At 2:01 pm, Blogger Aline said...

Of course yours features the Green Screen. Amazingly it's still in working order 22 years later!

 
At 2:08 pm, Blogger James said...

There is a great entry on Wiki for the CPC464

 
At 2:22 pm, Blogger James said...

The CPC series had really nice keyboard, just perfect for those long misspent winter evenings of BASIC programming.

My finest app was a Light Synth, amazingly it even had a recording feature that really worked, you could record about 12 minutes of instructions all of which could be set in realtime, I made a couple of very cool music videos this way.

I wonder if I could programme it again, in emulation . . . ? :)

 

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