I think that was what Tim was in charge of promoting.

I do love the Double Decker VHS recorder......anyone have one of those.

We used to have a video where you programmed the time etc. on the remote and then pressed a button and it sent it to the machine and included weekly/daily scheduled recordings etc. I'm sure it was an Amstrad, but they stopped making them when VideoPlus came on the scene

Amstrad is rubbish - SAS is the epitome of 'pile it high sell it cheap'

That may be so, but SAS has made a few quid doing it!!

I was round someone's house a few months ago and they had one of those emailer phones. Looked quite gadgetty but rather bulky. I did think "Why...?", but was more intrigued because it was the first I'd heard of Amstrad for a while who, for all I knew, were importing piglet toys from Sri Lanka.

Yes, and I remember when the only way to get rid of the mountain of unsold PCW9512s was to give them away on gameshows! I know cos my mum won one and gave it to me for my uni write-ups.

I don't know why I laughed at that, but I did.

We had one of those too. It had a scanner at the bottom of the remote to scan barcodes supplied with the VCR (time, date of recording). It was our first VCR.

As with most Amstrad products, it was designed to make technology accessible to the masses at an affordable price. If I remember correctly, at the same time, my Dad had to press small buttons on the front of his VCR to program it. It was very funny watching him try and do it and it always took him a while.

Whilst it was easier to use than many of the other VCRs of the time, it was cheaply made and didn't last too long.

k amstrad is an incredibly successful business. was it 500k emailer phones they sold?

Didn't Amstrad buy out the promising british company called Sinclair Research and then close them down virtually straight away?

Anyone have a Spectrum?

Success is a relative term. They've made a lot of money and shifted a lot of units; but compared to the big players - Microsoft, Dell, IBM, HP etc - Amstrad has fallen short.

viglen PCs were okay and for a few years were better value than dells. Unfortunetly (for viglen) dell now sells cheaper.

well you could say the same about most companies. The company iw ork for make turnover £2m a year, but it has competitors which make £8M a year, is the company iw ork for rubbish?

The point with Amstrad is that at one point it held 25% of Europe's PC market, yet now employs 90-odd people in Essex; it once had a market value of over a billion, but it now less than half of that; it was once an (almost, some may say) respected brand, but it now a laughing stock within the industry.

There was a brilliant article in one of the broadsheets (Indy or the FT, I think) last year that compared Amstrad to Dell and it went a long way to illustrated how limited Sugar is as a CEO. He has a lot of bluster and energy, but wasn't able to turn a pan-continental company multinational 'cos he was always chasing the fast buck rather than sitting down, taking advice & thinking long-term. He'll probable say that because he's not a schmoozer - whatever that means - but it's the difference between him and Bill Gates, and I know who I'd rather be.

i know who id rather be as well and im sure it is the same as yours. but i also know who i would rather be out of me and suggs. i work for a printers in manchester 8 hrs a day, he works for his own multi million pound company... no contest really

Yep! and the Sky boxes they make are crap too.

SAS made a deal it did not involve the company, merely its name and products for £5 million. The previous year the company was worth over £100 million but didn't do its research correctly with the Sincliar C5. SAS sold a new spectrum the ZX Spectrum 128k+3, didn't sell so pulled out of the gaming market. The company still exists today, continuing to market Sir Clive Sinclair's newest inventions. http://www.sinclair-research.co.uk

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/realityt...gi.html?page=2

Tre and katie both seem to have concluded so

Yes, not used for many years now a 128k model with a tape drive, took about 30 minutes to load a game. We have about 100 games to go with it and a gun for the James Bond game.

I bought an Amstrad laptop in 1992, a 386 processor, it came with 2 MB memory which I upgraded to 4, DOS 3, I u/g to 6.1 and then Windows 3.1. It still works, my mother uses it to play Free cell and I play minesweeper on it when I visit. The dot matrix printer needs 32 kb of memory I think, but ribbons are the problem. It still looks good and was a superb m/c, I wrote 3 dissertations on it.

Quality product from Amstrad - http://www.amstrad.com/hk/licensed_products/hk218.html

Ah memories.

I had their satellite dish and the double decker video recorder.

Thanks for putting me straight, I wasn't very old at the time and therefore, didn't take too much notice of the business world then.
Perhaps it shows that maybe SAS's business decisions haven't always better than the candidates!

This is utter rubbish. The Amstrad made Sinclair Spectrums *did* sell and were the market leading home computers until 1989 and sold in excess of 3 million units.

In addition, it was more than just the C5 that took Sinclair down. Investment in wafer memory and the R+D costs of the Sinclair QL (which was horifically delayed) cost the company dear. The C5 on it's own wasn't enough to sink it. Sinclair also had a number of other expensive R+D products in the pipework including a Super Spectrum.

So the +2 and +3 were a success and it was not just the C5 that sunk Sinclair.

Perhaps you should do some research before passing off inaccurcies as facts?

Used to have a 6128 when I was a kid, think it's still in the loft somehwere!

Sir Alan is a member here lol.

Does anybody know if you can actually buy those emailer phones from retailers such as comet, dixons etc beacause i only ever see them for sale on ebay