256k memory lane

A nostalgia-inducing article on the BBC today. Ah, the Amstrad PCW. My friend.

I bought mine with money received for my twenty first birthday. I had already discerned the need for a word processor in my life - easier to write and edit, kinder to my neighbours than the manual typewriter I was then using for writing. Amstrad got their marketing exactly right. Most people probably weren’t going to buy a home computer because they couldn’t think what to do with one – and a computer really was just that, the CPU. Keyboards, monitors and disc drives were optional extras to buy separately. (Mouse? What’s that?) Word processing was the most likely application for home use but word processors at the time tended to be dedicated machines – a computer to all intents and purposes except that they processed words and that was it. A user-friendly word processor on a cheap and cheerful, all-peripherals-bundled computer (including its own one-sheet-at-a-time dot matrix printer) was the perfect solution.

No C: drives, of course. Everything ran off universally incompatible three-inch 180k floppy discs – or 720k if you got the 8512 model or added a high density floppy drive yourself. The word processor, Locoscript, was its own operating system and took up so much space on the boot discs that so you had to switch discs to edit anything if your file was of any decent size. (A fact that you eventually had to work out for yourself.) Alternatively you could load the other operating system, CP/M, and run programs off that. The software came from a different age when everything was about 99% bug free before it left the factory – and people’s expectations were so low that they would forgive the remaining 1% quite happily. (Microsoft have their faults, which you can learn to live with, but the one thing I can’t forgive is the way they have standardised shoddy workmanship to the point where it’s expected and accepted.)

For anything fancy like a spelling checker the world had to wait with bated breath for Locoscript 2. Another problem 2 solved was 1’s habit of scrolling, very slowly, through a document whenever you saved it. Apparently it was to check the formatting. It would head down to the bottom of the file, think about it, then scroll slowly back up again to wherever the cursor was at that point. Fine if you’re just typing a letter; if you’re working on a 5000 word story, not helpful. If you were still working off the Locoscript boot disc, or hadn’t got the hang of working off the memory drive, chances were good it would run out of space and complain at you. I learnt to work in small files – in fact, until very recently I still wrote novels with one chapter per Word file. Old habits die hard.

On the plus side, you weren’t distracted by Minesweeper or Freecell because they didn’t exist ... The nearest games were a whole reboot away and probably written in BASIC so you could customise them to your heart’s content.

At work we often got books sent in on PCW discs which meant I could edit them at home. We had to send them off to a bureau that would put them onto – gasp! – 5.25" floppies (the last generation of floppies that really could flop) for our office PCs. I once got an author’s disc where he had even broken his chapters into different subsections, each one in its own file named by subtopic. So, the contents of his book appeared on screen in alphabetical order. Oh, what fun that was to sort out. One of my first professional paid pieces of writing wasn’t science fiction, it was an essay in one of the PCW consumer magazines on how best to prepare your manuscript for a publisher. I may still have it somewhere.

So the PCW was far from perfect but it introduced a generation to the basic computing habits that we take for granted in any modern software – and indeed hardware. How impressed would you be today if you bought a new PC from Tesco and got blank looks if you asked where the keyboard was? Or had to buy the OS separately? (And I mean had to, Linux geeks, as opposed to optionally buying a better one ...) It changed expectations and set new ones.

My first couple of published stories – and many, many unpublished ones – were written on my old green-screened friend, as were the first few chapters of His Majesty’s Starship. I only really got rid of it and upgraded to a PC to be compatible with work. Windows had just arrived, e-mail and the web were looming on the horizon – the poor old thing would never have coped.

The new PC was a laptop with a 30Mb hard disk. The veritable bee’s knees. Any further advances have been purely cosmetic ...