The Amstrad Times.
 

Spin off from the discussion about the Ferguson ICC5 in which the Shoeburyness assembled Amstrad CTV2200 was mentioned.

The Amstrad Times: https://www.amshold.com/social_media...trad_Times.pdf

DFWB.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

Read it from top to bottom..thanks for the posting

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

Yes, that reminds me that I didn't get back to thank DFWB for that link - a nice little potted history of AMS Trading.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

"Read it from top to bottom".

Me too! Thanks for a fascinating read Fernseh.

Mike

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

Makes very interesting reading.
Takes me back to the heady days of selling many of his products , tower systems , video recorders, computers, CB Radios, Cassette decks, the list goes on and on.


I do like the advert for the Hi Fi amps , I have an original 8000 model amp which I picked up for a fiver at a car boot sale years ago and it actually still works!

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

Enjoyed reading that!

I bought one of those e-mailer telephones in 2007. It worked very well until Amstrad discontinued the service, which was called Amserve (or might have been Amsurf)

I've still got it somewhere, and it has over three years' worth of emails in the memory. Unfortunately, the backlight for the LCD screen has stopped working, so the only way I could read them is by shining a strong light on the screen.

One of these days I might open it up and see if it's repairable.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

The cigarette and hinge lid pack of Benson & Hedges on top of the Integra 4000 !

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

Thanks for the link, reading through it brought back many memories. The first PC I used was one of the Amstrad IBM clones and somewhere I have still got one of the CB sets.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I had one of those tower Hi-Fi systems.

It must have been good, because even Mike Baldwin had one in his lounge, although the Props dept. at Granada lost the big volume knob which was embarrassingly obvious in a lot of episodes.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I also had an Amstrad tower, my excuse is that my dad gave me it when he upgraded... to another Amstrad tower. Sigh. I also had an Amstrad Studio 100, the infamous stereo with a 4 track cassette for primitive home "studio" recording. It could only use Ferric tape and had no Dolby even (the "noise reduction" circuit was a very simple low pass filter).

I have no excuse for purchasing that at all other than it was the 80s and I was young and foolish. I already had a relatively profesh Fostex 4 track so what the heck was I thinking..?

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I owned the E3 Amstrad Video phone it seemed a sensible thing to buy it was an eBay listing and cost me £22.00 including postage. I owned it for 2 years and stopped using it because the imaging was very poor at times, it was double images. After a while it may settle down but there seemed to be very little chance of repairing it for a sensible amount of money. I seem to recall that if I had bought 2 of them I could have given one to my mum but I tried to see if she could operate mine but it was too confusing for her.

I was remembering that many years ago whilst watching Thunderbirds on TV and thinking that videophones would one day in the future become a reality. I also remember being offered an Amstrad music centre and turned it down because I would not have been able to play my 78's on it.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I read his Autobiography titled , "what you see is what you get," and I can honestly say it was one of the most entertaining books I have ever read.
I know cheap Amstrad VCR`s like the 4600 in the late 80's helped kill off the repair trade, but I admire him, for building up a huge Multi National company from nothing.
And I would suggest working Ridley Rd Market was probably the best business training anyone could have.

Ken, G6HZG

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

Thanks for posting this. The only Amstrad product I had was a PCW8256 (subsequently upgraded to 512 , a second internal 3" drive and an external 3 1/2" drive, and now languishing at the back of the shed). No complaints about functionality or build quality, and for general typing I still miss some of the user-friendly features of the PCW word processor, such as the ability to store and retrieve 26 short blocks of text under the alpha-numeric keys for instant pasting by single key presses, ideal when I used to do translation work. Printing was admittedly slow.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I think the first models we sold were TS33s then the dual tape one arrived and blew the competition out of the water! Can't remember the model number (it might be TS88) .
As for the Amstrad emailer phone you still see them at carboot sales on a regular basis as I think you can still use them as a regular phone .

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I'm ashamed to admit that i still look at Amstrad Studio 100s on eBay and can feel the stirrings of temptation. I have resisted so far!

I has an Amstrad TS56 tower system that I loved at the time. However, even I can remember feeling sure that the fact you could hear the plastic ribs of the platter passing under the stylus during quiet moments was a bad thing...

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

We had the TS30 tower, came from either Woolworths or Rumbelows, I forget, but it was delivered by van one evening. It wasn't cheap, though alot cheaper than a seperates system, and it gave years of good service and pleasure as our first stereo system, first FM radio and first record player. Before this, cassettes were played on a portable cassette recorder and the only radio was a GEC Transistor Seven. It had a BSR manual turntable, a good cassette system and the IC-based amplifier went loud enough for parties. It also looked good with all that brushed aluminium and smoked glass, very trendy. Bear in mind our TV in the corner was a Philips G8, so this thing was bang up to date.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I really wanted an Amstrad Studio 100 when they came out; but, as with the enormous boombox alluded to previously, ended up spending the money I was saving up for it on something else instead. Probably a dot-matrix printer!

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

Reading through the Amstrad Times, it is interesting there is no mention of their top-loading 7050 Dolby cassette deck introduced around 1975-76.. This product was made in and imported from Japan.

Although aimed at low end users the performance was reasonable but had fairly short record/playback head life. It appeared to perform better with BASF and 3M tape stock so was probably set up that way.

I will have to dig the machine out and see how it fares compared with a period Sony TC135SD!

Rich

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I was of the Amstrad generation but I wasn’t fooled by the hype and decided I could do better audio which I did, but not as cheaply as Mr. Sugar.

My Mother used an Emailer incessantly until it stopped working, then we had to buy her a Macintosh. Now, In her 90th year, she is re-writing the internet.

Re: The Amstrad Times.
 

I used to work at a place in Rugby back in around 2003/2003 refurbishing a load of those e-mailer things! A lot of them had faulty backlight inverters, there was some rumours that they had a habit of burning the plastic case when they overheated!

My Dad used to have an Amstrad computer, was his first home PC, probably in the very early 90’s, I remember it needed 4 AA batteries in the top for something, not sure what! It ended up getting a virus of some sort, which the local computer shop couldn’t fix (or couldn’t be arsed to fix!) so my Dad got it replaced on the house insurance saying it got dropped down the stairs!! It was replaced with a custom built machine that ran Windows 3.1.

Oh, if anyone wants it, I have an Amstrad ‘Micro 1000’ stereo taking up space, and it still works!

Regards
Lloyd