The first modem I paid for...

[lovingboth]

... was a 2400 bits per second one: absolutely cutting edge stuff compared to the 300 bps ones or the 1200 bps from them to you but only 75 bps from you to them (!) of the previous UK standards.

It was an Amstrad, and it came with a portable luggable PC clone called the PPC-640 thrown in.

(This was about the size and weight of two reams of heavy A4 paper short edge to short edge, 8MHz 8086-clone CPU, 640k RAM, twin 3.5" 720k floppies, small black and white LCD screen with no back light making it Somewhat Difficult to read unless you had a good light source behind you, and CGA graphics = 80x25 characters or 320x200 in four ugly colours, or 640x200 in black and white. Eight or ten D size batteries would run it for about an hour when disconnected from the mains.)

Doing it this way was, for a while, the cheapest way to get a 2400 modem! Some people bought one, attached their 'real' PC to the PPC's serial port and ran a small program on the PPC so their PC would think it was directly connected to the modem.

They cost about £800 new. I paid about £250 for a second hand one, less than a year after the launch.

Comments

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

I remember that machine. It was rather splendid (and was my first introduction to the magical world of the internet).

[lovingboth]

Apart from the lack of a hard disk, I liked it, but then I plugged it into a CGA monitor (bought cheap from some shop trying to sell off the incredibly awful Amstrad 'Sinclair games PC'.)

Using the V30 clone of the 8086 meant I could use its 8080 emulation mode to run CP/M software at about 4x the speed of the CP/M machine I had!

[purplerabbits.livejournal.com]

Well yes, and when you passed it on I used that monitor too, so I have very little experience of the awful screen...

[lovingboth]

Ah, that's what happened to it! It must have been after I got the 20MHz 386 that, along with a VGA screen that's still working, cost about a grand. Whoever invents a time machine will make a fortune selling computer kit to the past.

Did I ask for anything?

I'm delighted you've happy memories of it.

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

oh yes.. quite good machines other than the backlight and the famous Alan Sugar quote 'I dont see what's wrong with the bloody screen - I can read it'. Actually the CGA graphics, if the same as that in the 1512 had a special 16 colour mode at a low resolution - it was supported by very few programs though - I expect if you still have it you could try running Fractint for DOS on it and see what happens.

[lovingboth]

He must have sat with a large window behind him! I do remember he'd insisted the pixels were square, so that circles looked like circles.

I sold it on ages ago, but I did run Fractint on it and, no, it didn't have the special graphics mode - it was more like the PC1640 which had 'real PC clone' chips inside rather than the 'not quite exact clones' of the 1512s.

(Eg Borland did some cheap PC1512-only software that wrote strange values to CRT controller registers that didn't exist on the 1512, but would crap the screen of anything with the real things.)

In part to speed up some of the Fractint displays, I opened the PPC and - after an immense struggle - managed to both fit a 8087 maths co-processor and close the thing. The line about the size being determined by the Sugar demand for a full sized keyboard weren't quite true: the insides were packed...

PC Plus started life as 'for users of the Amstrad PC1512'!

[syllopsium.livejournal.com]

Interesting! Never knew that :)

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

Ah, them were the days.

Just the other day I was reminiscing about the Amstrad PCW8256 and PCW9512. I was the 'upmarket/business' assistant in a computer shop in the late 80s, and these were far and away my favourite machines to sell to people who wanted a computer for something other than games. If they insisted on a proper PC I'd sell one, but then you had to sell them a printer, and a cable, and some word processing software, none of which you could guarantee would work together. Unhappy people all round. With the PCWs you had the whole lot in one box and it worked. Fabulous stuff.