Amstrad PCW - WikiHQ

The Amstrad PCW series is a range of personal computers produced by British company Amstrad from 1985 to 1998, and also sold under licence in Europe as the "Joyce" by the German electronics company Schneider in the early years of the series' life. The PCW, short for Personal Computer Word-processor, was targeted at the word processing and home office markets. When it was launched, the cost of a PCW system was under 25% of the cost of almost all PC compatibles in the UK, and as a result the machine was very popular both in the UK and in Europe. The series sold 8 million units. The last two models, introduced in the mid-1990s, were commercial failures, because of falling prices, greater capabilities, and wider range of software for PC compatibles.

The series consists of PCW 8256 and PCW 8512 (introduced in 1985), Amstrad's founder Alan Sugar realised that most computers in the United Kingdom were used for word processing at home, However the portrait display was quickly eliminated because it would have been too expensive, and an included printer also became a separate unit. At its British launch in September 1985, including printer, word processor program, the CP/M operating system and associated utilities, and Mallard BASIC and Dr. Logo. Software vendors quickly made a wide range of additional applications available, including accounting, spreadsheet, and database programs, so that the system was able to support most of the requirements of a home or small business. The low price encouraged home users to trade up from older, simpler systems like the ZX Spectrum. According to Personal Computer World, the PCW "got the technophobes using computers". In the first two years over 700,000 PCWs were sold, and 20% of the European personal computer market, second only to IBM's 33.3% share. Amstrad became the dominant British personal computer company, buying all the designs, marketing rights and product stocks of Sinclair Research Ltd's computer division in April 1986, while Apricot later sold its manufacturing assets to Mitsubishi and became a software company. they featured other content such as articles by science fiction writer and software developer Dave Langford on his experiences of using the PCW.

By 1989, units had been sold. When the PCW line was retired in 1998, 8 million machines had been sold. The Daily Telegraph estimated in 2000 that 100,000 were still in use in the UK, and said that the reliability of the PCW's hardware and software and the range of independently produced add-on software for its word processing program were factors in its continued popularity.<!-- ***********

Daily Telegraph says 1.5M sold. Probably counts UK only.

--> Laing said the PCW line's downfall was that "proper PCs became affordable". In 1993 the PCW still cost under £390 while a PC system with a printer and word processing software cost over £1,000, but after adjustment for inflation the retail price of a multimedia IBM-compatible PC in 1997 was about 11% more than that of a PCW 8256 in 1985, and many home PCs were cast-offs, sometimes costing as little as £50, from large organisations that had upgraded their systems.

Models and features

PCW 8256 and 8512

The PCW 8256 was launched in September 1985 Launched a few months later, the PCW 8512 has 512 KB of RAM and two floppy disk drives. The monitor displays green characters on a black background. It measures diagonally, and shows 32 lines of 90 characters each.

right|thumbnail|150px|3-inch drive common on Amstrad machines

The floppy disk drives on these models are in the unusual 3-inch "compact floppy" format, In the range's early days supplies of 3-inch floppies occasionally ran out, There are several techniques for transferring data from a PCW to an IBM-compatible PC, some of which also can transfer in the opposite direction, and service companies that will do the job for a fee.

While all the 3-inch disks are double-sided, the PCW 8256's 3-inch drive and the PCW 8512's upper one were single-sided, while the 8512's lower one was double-sided and double-density.

The dot matrix printer has a sheet feed for short documents and a tractor feed for long reports on continuous stationery. It can print 90 characters per second at draft quality and 20 characters per second at higher quality, However it has only 9 printing pins and its higher quality does not match that of 24-pin printers. The partnership between Amstrad and Schneider was formed to market the Amstrad CPC range of computers, and ended when Amstrad launched the PCW9512.

PCW 9512 and 9256

The PCW 9512, introduced in 1987 at a price of £499 plus VAT, has a white-on-black screen instead of green-on-black, and the bundled printer is a daisy-wheel model instead of a dot-matrix printer. The 9512 was also supplied with version 2 of Locoscript, including spellchecker and mail merge facilities. In all other respects the 9512's facilities are the same as the 8512's.

In 1991 the 9512 was replaced by the PCW 9256 and 9512+, both equipped with a single 3½-inch disk drive that can access 720 KB. The 9512+ has 512 KB of RAM, Despite its name it is totally incompatible with all previous PCW systems. Instead of having two operating environments, LocoScript for word processing, and CP/M for other uses, it had its own GUI operating system, known as "Rosanne". This can only run one application at a time, and starting another application makes the previous one save all the files it had changed and then close. The bundled word processor was produced by Creative Technology, and can read LocoScript files but saves them in its own format. the PcW16 uses a 1 MB flash memory to store the programs and user files. while contemporary personal computers use 16-bit or 32-bit CPUs. The price included a mouse for use with the GUI, Few PcW16s were sold.

The program enables users to divide documents into groups, display the groups on a disk and then the documents in the selected group, and set up a template for each group. The "limbo file" facility enables users to recover accidentally deleted documents until the disk ran out of space, when the software permanently deletes files to make room for new ones.

Layout facilities includes setting and using tab stops, The menu system has two layouts, one for beginners and the other for experienced users. Users must reboot to switch between Locoscript and a CP/M application, unless they use a utility called "Flipper", which allocates separate areas of RAM to Locoscript and CP/M. The CP/M software bundle also includes DR Logo and a graphics program that can produce pie charts and bar charts.

Sage Accounts and Payroll,
Other programming languages, including C.
Many games. Most are text adventures but there are also graphical games like Batman, Bounder, and Head over Heels. The ROM-based code cannot display text, being too small to support character generation; instead, it displays a bright screen which is progressively filled by black stripes as the code is loaded from the floppy.

Printer

To make the printer cheap enough to be included with every PCW, Amstrad placed the majority of its drive electronics inside the PCW cabinet. The printer case contains only electromechanical components and high-current driver electronics; its power is via a coaxial power connector socket on the monitor casing. Rather than using a traditional Centronics port, pin and motor signals are connected directly by a 34-wire ribbon cable to an 8041 microcontroller on the PCW's mainboard. Software works with the printer via Epson emulation.

Most models of PCW were bundled with a 9-pin dot matrix printer mechanism, with the later 9512 and 9512+ models using a daisywheel (with a different cable; printers are not interchangeable with the dot matrix models). These PCW printers cannot be used on other computers, and the original PCW lacks a Centronics port. Instead, the Z80 bus and video signals are brought to an edge connector socket at the back of the cabinet. Many accessories including parallel and serial ports were produced for this interface. Some of the later models include a built-in parallel port; these could be bundled with either the dedicated Amstrad printer or a Canon Bubblejet model.

Video system

The PCW video system emulates a VT52 and was not designed for video games, although several graphical games exist. The display's addressable area is 90 columns and 32 lines with a resolution of 720 by 256 pixels. At 1 bit per pixel, this occupied 23 KB of RAM which is far too large for the Z80 CPU to scroll in software without ripple and tearing of the display. Instead, the PCW implements a Roller RAM consisting of a 512-byte area of RAM that holds the address of each line of display data. The screen can be scrolled either by changing the Roller RAM contents or by writing to an I/O port that set the starting point in Roller RAM for the screen data. This allows for very rapid scrolling. The video system also fetches data in a special order so that plotting a character eight scan lines high touches eight contiguous addresses. This meants that the Z80's concise block copy instructions, such as LDIR, can be used. Unfortunately, it also means that drawing lines and other shapes is very complicated.

Emulators

JOYCE PCW 8256/8512 emulator for Windows / Unix
Joyce for Mac by Richard F. Bannister.
CP/M Box PCW emulator for Windows, by Habisoft
ZEsarUX 8-bit machines multi emulator, including PCW 8256/8512, for Linux, Mac and Windows, by César Hernández Bañó

References

External links

Amstrad PCW 16 page at www.old-computers.com
Amstrad PCW 8256/8512 at www.old-computers.com
PCW Joyce Computer Club
Screen shots of the PcW16's Rosanne GUI
PCW nostalgia. BBC Web page.
PCW Emulator CP/M Box