What is that monstrosity you just clicked on? Click on this pic for a closeup:
That is an Amstrad PPC512 from 1988. I won't bore you with the specs. If you want to know more, here's it's Wikipedia page - Amstrad PPC512
I worked as a computer guy back in the nineties. The first company I worked for as an IT guy, rather than employing sales reps directly, employed sales agents. Typically one man or one woman bands, they were scattered all over England and almost all worked from home. There was a reason for that. Most of them never earned enough money to work from anywhere else. There was a reason for that, too. We were a crap company who barely stayed afloat (and then didn't) and the agents were mostly clueless. Not all were clueless. Some were very very good. Pure naturals. And while others were so naturally clueless that nothing could ever have helped them, the rest were clueless because they hadn't been trained. I was determined not to let that happen on the computing side, so I carved out a little niche for myself helping these people out. My boss was happy because while I was being nice to them, they weren't moaning at him. Such is the way of life in a small struggling company about to go to the wall. While I sometimes visited them, they mostly visited me. The draw, at that time, of somebody who knew a smidgeon of computing stuff vs those who knew even less.
Unlike now, where it's PC, Mac, or phone, Windows or Linux, back then the business computer landscape was vastly more heterogenous than today. Many businesses had a PC compatible or two, but beyond that I just never knew what kind of PC would cross my desk or be sitting in someone's Aladdin's Cave of a home office. 8086, 8088, V20, V30, 186 (very rarely, and often powering not true compatibles), 286, 386, 486, Intel, NEC, AMD, Cyrix, sx, dx, 5, 6, 8, 10, 16, 20, 25, 33, 40, 66MHz, ISA, EISA, MCA, VLB, MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA, SVGA, ST-506, ESDI, XTA (rarely), ATA, 360K, 1.2 MB, 720K, 1.44 MB, 5.25", 3.5", 3" (yes, really, but at least 8" was well and truly gone by this point), turbo buttons and flashy front panels, several versions of MS-DOS and PC-DOS (and let's not forget CP/M in all it's various guises), and more clone builders than you could shake a stick at. I worked for one for a short while just as Windows 95 arrived on the scene. An 'interesting' experience, shall we say.
Many of the agents were similar in that they were almost all 'characters', like the guy who hacked the office servers late one night (yes, small businesses had servers, of sorts, even back then) who got caught trying to format the hard-drives because I happened to still be around (a computer reality check for anyone who still thinks computers are 'glamorous'). I watched, vaguely amused, as he dropped to DOS and began to type that fateful phrase, "FORMAT C:". Then I pulled the plug (literally) on him and reported him to my boss in the morning and that was the end of him. One of the more amusing phone calls I've witnessed, "Yeah, we've got a log of you connecting up, alright? *** LONG PAUSE *** Yes, that's probably for the best. Bye." It might have helped if we'd paid him, though, as I found out later. My reward? "Can we secure those damn machines?" "Yes", I replied. You always look good when you sort out a system that was installed before your time.
Then there was the African chap who hadn't lived in England for long and had been conned out of his cash when he bought a PC that could barely be switched on. The machine was a non-starter, almost literally, and even if it had worked OK, it was still too old to run the required software. I went through the motions just to show him I was OK to deal with and then gave him some advice about not buying second-hand and how PC's were getting so cheap you might as well buy a new one. No easy task when you can't speak a word of Nigerian and the other guy can barely speak English. Still, he took my advice (and my hand waving) and everything was OK, until he was fired for being a bit too dodgy. You never lie to a customer.
So, what about this Amstrad thing, then? Well, as you might have guessed, one of these landed on my desk one day. I didn't know what to think of it. Was it even a PC? Apparently, "Yes, it is. Will it do?" Not convinced, I booted her up. Decent keyboard, MSDOS, but less than 640K, and no XMS memory, so that was that. A pity, since it was quite robust (which made it too heavy and bulky to be portable in the modern sense). I gave him the sorry news, and a new PC was duly ordered. A brand spanking new 486sx25 with 4MB of RAM, a 256 MB hard-drive, DOS, and Windows 3.1. Not the best even in 1994 (or 1995, I forget), but a power house compared to everything else I saw in that job, bar my company owned dx40 which was actually faster than those sx25's (not by accident, I would add, and I made a fair offer for it when the company went bust), and a 486dx66, with 16MB of RAM and a 512 MB drive. Our database server. Or would have been, except that was a database which failed to launch even to the tune of 20 odd thousand pounds. And if I told you about the shennanigans surrounding that, you'd never believe me.
As for this computer, there isn't much more to say. It was quite heavy, had a green screen which was slower than a normal screen, and the battery was shot. And being seven years old, it was far too old to be of use to us. So why am I talking about it even though I don't remember that much about it and it was a bit of a dog? Because it worked. Amstrad were a company that made things cheap enough to buy without maxing out your credit card, but they still worked. Amstrads weren't the most long-lived of machines, in my experience, but no worse than many others of their day.
And that's it. Many people talk about this spec and that spec. That's nothing new. People and the PC mags were just the same back then. But they mean something different to me. They're a tool. My car isn't that big, isn't that fast, and the fuel economy isn't great. But it didn't cost a lot and it works and I keep it going without too much hassle or money. And my PC is the same. I built it out of parts (brand new parts, that is, and Kingston branded memory, who are the only memory guys I trust) over 5 years ago, and it's still working great. I hoover the dust out of it every so often, never overclock it, and it's never crashed (Linux has a couple of times, but it's free so who cares?).
No, it's not the PC's that are important or interesting. It's the people who owned and used them. Did I mention the agent with that Amstrad was a croupier? And that he hated his job so much he wanted to get in even with the likes of us? He's probably dead now, and his PPC512 probably ended up in a skip, but my memories are still here. And now a few of them are yours, so maybe there's a chance they won't end up in a 'skip', too.