The PC That Cracked Europe - Amstrad PC1512 and 1640 | Computer History

● Cave Links

● Description
Europe was weened on low cost 8bit micros in the home, spending in excess of £1000 on a home computer seemed absured when we were used to £399 for a complete machine including monitor. So how would we ever adopt IBM PC's with their huge price tags? Amstrad had the answer. Lets take a look at the PC1512 and PC1640 which took Europe by storm.

● Music
All music is used under license

● RMC Tool Shop - Find tools seen on the channel for your Cave here:

[RMCRetro]

What are your views on the Amstrad PC1512? Did you have one? Did it launch in your region under a different name and if so how was it received? I'd love to hear your memories. Thank you for watching and thanks to MrLurch for sharing his experiences of using the DB9 joystick port and PixelVixen for her feedback in helping create this video. Neil - RMC

[rickbuzz]

Doris' poetry was missing the last line.

"If you don't believe this lie is true, ask the blind man. He saw it, too."

[DBartelDK]

I live in Denmark and got my PC1512 in 1988, with the monochrome screen. I only had it for a few month, until I started to expand it. First I got the extra RAM, so it had 640K. Then I put in an internal 1200 baud modem (wow it was fast ). Within the first year, I got a WD 32 GB HDD, and a CTRL card. The bracket for the mount of the HDD, I made in aluminium. It was a fantastic machine :-) I used it a lot with Wordstar, and also installed a parallel print port, as i bought a matrix printer. Later one of the 360 floppy drives were replaced with a 3, 5" FD 720K. All together I had it for almost 4 years, until I moved on... Thanks for the great video you made! It brought me down memory lane :-)

[pmedwards]

I worked for Amstrad in their attempts to break into the U.S. PC market. I worked in their Longview, Texas warehouse first doing basic upgrades to systems like 640k or adding a hard drive. Later I worked in tech support and customer service in both Longview and Irving, Texas.

[A-JMotorsport]

Reasons why I watch Retro Man Cave
1. Fascinating computer content
2. The most relaxing voice on YouTube

[darkstarnh]

The nonsense verse reminds me of one from my childhood in the (very) early 60s.

One night when climbing up the stair I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish that he would go away!

[alancordwell]

I remember wasting a great many hours trying to install a hard disk in my 1512, I bought the Western Digital WD1001D card new and a used Seagate MFM drive from a rally. You had to jumper the card for cylinders, heads, and so on. It would recognise the drive, low level format it, partition it... but it would not appear as a C drive, try as hard as I might. It was only many years later that two nuggets of information came to hand that might have saved me much frustration one was that the ROS was just not BIOS compatible, and the other was that the WD controller cards fitted by Amstrad in the 1640 apparently had a custom ROM fitted; presumably to fix the compatibility! But I loved the 1512 to bits- I spent hours programming in BASICA (20-odd years later and I am a professional software developer) and hooked it to my amateur radio packet modem and sat up into the small hours playing on bulletin boards and node hopping. Happy days!!

[TheVintageApplianceEmporium]

This video takes me back to 1992 / 1993 - I had a PC1512 as my very first PC which was shortly followed by a PC1640 with EGA and a 20Mb MFM HDD! I still remember the sound when turning it on; was like a washing machine going into a spin cycle! I also bought an upgrade for the 1640 in the form of an external 3.5" floppy drive. It was pretty useless only being 720k but it allowed me to take files into school and make copies of my friend's software. I adored those machines and even now in 2019, when I have the need to type a DOS command, I always think of them <3 <3

[TheRetroByte]

I never owned one but my first job I worked in a computer shop in sheffield UK and we had the 1512 and the 1640 on display. Didn't sell many though. Most parents walking into our shop looking for a computer for the family walked out with an Amiga A500... oh the memories..

[Hiltibold]

My parents bought me this computer in 1988 when I was eight years old. It was my first computer. Wonderfull times! Btw: In parts of Europe these computers were sold under the brand name of "Schneider"!

[dbranconnier]

I remember a store in Canada called "The Brick" that also sold these Amstrad computers. They came with GEM Write and GEM Paint. They were very nice machines and reminded me of the Tandy PCs from Radio Shack.

[declasm]

I had an Amstrad PC1512! This was my first computer in 1987 and I was only 5 years old but I remember it so well. For the next 5 years I taught myself everything I could about it and read through the manual and learnt all of the DOS commands and it kick-started my interest in all things PC related. Great nostalgic video - thanks!

[tolkienfan]

My Dad's first IBM PC compatible was a 1640, and I loved it. I had learned about everything there was to know about out TRS-80. The 1640 was such a step up I was in heaven. I haven't heard anything about that or the 1512 since. What an amazing walk down memory lane!

[merlinathrawes]

I learned to programme C+ on these in 1989 doing my C+G 223 diploma ;) They were, erm, very good for that actually. I always wanted to look inside one as I couldn't at my place of education! Thanks so much for putting to rest, a desire I never knew I had so many decades later ;)

[Thiesi]

I attended a BASIC programming course - my very first programming course ever! - at a local youth center back in early 1987, and I remember we were using *one* Schneider PC for the entire class (yep, silicon was apparently expensive back in the day). I don't remember whether it was a 1512 or 1640 though.

Anyway, thanks for one more great video on this great channel, Neil! I really appreciate your content!

[stockicide]

That poem was apparently much older. Some light googling lead me to this explanation:

The book "The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren" by Iona and Peter Opie, published in 1959, catalogues many different schoolyard poems (including this one) from throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Opie noted that this poem had been collected in 12 different schools around the UK, but that it had also been collected, with almost no variation, fifty years before. It was probably older than that, too.

[ShannonRMcKenzie]

Thanks so much for this review - the 1640 was the first IBM-compatible PC I got to use here in Australia (everyone I knew had C64s before my cousins bought their Amstrad). We went on to buy our own Amstrad 3-286, and this led to the career in I.T. that I still work in today

[derrogers]

this was my first pc. was given to me by my father after he updated. i had one with hercules graphics card and 20mb harddive. i loved it and learned programming in turbo pascal. i enjoyed it so much !

[fredbloggs]

I was Amstrad certified to do repairs on those things back in the 80s. We had loads of them at the Government place I was working at the time.

[bpcgos]

I always depends on subtitles when view other youtube channels, but your crystal clear, steady voices trully helps me as non native speaker...