23 Aug
2012
23 Aug
'12
3:15 p.m.
On 23 August 2012 15:54, Michael Kerpan <madcrow.maxwell at gmail.com> wrote:
Personally, I'm partial to the Amstrad PCW
line.While it was marketed
as a dedicated word processor in much of the world, it had gobs of RAM
(at least 256KB), high-resolution monochrome graphics (720x256) and
shipped with a very nice CP/M Plus implementation which included a
better-than-average BASIC as well as DRI LOGO and the GSX graphics
libraries. The non-standard 3 inch floppies are a bit of a drag, but
it was fairly easy to add 3.5 inch drives and even hard drives were
available.
I was going to say pretty much that!
I guess there's little awareness because [a] they're not American and
weren't big in America, [b] they were a very late-period CP/M machine
and thus not very "classic" and [c] Amstrad are perceived as cheap &
plasticky.
The "Joyce" was a lovely machine, I thought. I got a PCW9512 as my
21st birthday present in 1988. It was fast for a Z80, had a whacking
great 90*32 screen (IIRC), 720K drives and a parallel port. Decent
keyboard, too.
And of course a nice big RAMdisk as drive M:, so a single-floppy
machine was entirely usable - I set up boot scripts to copy all the
nonresident CP/M commands to M and set whatever the CP/M equivalent of
a search path was. You could fit half a floppy's worth in there, so
only needing a data disk in the drive.
720*256 graphics (again, IIRC), with a bright attribute, too, I think.
I had /very/ slow Mandelbrot sets rendering on it. More or less a CP/M
box with a Hercules Graphics Card. :?)
It had CP/M+ but no RTC, so timestamps didn't work unless you entered
the time manually at boot-up.
I was very kindly given a mint, BNIB-in-box PCW9512+ by listmember
Roger Pugh a couple of years ago. The little -known 9512+ replaces the
3" floppies with a more standard 3?", which is handy.
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884