Amstrad, the "mug's eyeful" and that "51 column" screen
> Did Amstrad ever *really* push the boundaries? Perhaps not
No, and I don't think Amstrad or Sugar were *ever* interested in being that sort of company. They were always about (apparently) giving the consumer lots of features for little money.
Which- in itself- wasn't necessarily a bad thing. Quite the opposite, back when electronics were expensive, and state-of-the-art eyewateringly so, there's something perfectly decent- if not noble- about cutting the elitest crap and selling electronics at prices ordinary people could afford. In principle.
The problem was- from what I've heard- that Sugar used his undoubted ability to relate to what the 70s/80s man on the street wanted in a cynical manner, to sell (e.g.) audio equipment that looked like it was offering a great range of features and gimmicks at a price way lower than its competitors, but were actually cheap, poor-quality, low-performance trash under the skin. (He said as much himself regarding his 70s "hi-fi" trash, and in a manner that suggested he wasn't remotely ashamed of it).
Here's a great Register article by the late Guy Kewney on Amstrad and Alan Sugar and "the Mug's Eyeful".
That said, their mid-to-late 80s computers were the area where they came out looking a whole lot better, where Sugar's understanding of what people people wanted and could afford and the "Mug's eyeful" approach actually translated into machines that were genuinely good value for the money.
Yeah, the Z80-based PCW wasn't state of the art, but that was the point- it would have cost several times the price if it had been, and that wasn't the target market. It included everything needed for a cheap word processor/office machine at that price, and nothing that it didn't.
And even when it came to "real" PC compatibles, they were one of the first in Europe to sell models that were cheap enough to start pushing it into mass market territory. Even the hard drive problems with their next-generation PC-compatibles that damaged their reputation in the early-90s turned out to be ultimately Seagate's fault.
Amstrad sort of lost direction and fizzled out after that, but the computers at least were good- even if never state of the art.
> the Amstrad Spectrum +3, but that only had a 51 column screen
And even that falls into "not really" territory.
I knew about the +3 at the time, but only recently discovered it could run CP/M which made me wonder how usable that would be with the standard 32 column Spectrum text. So even the minimal "51 columns" you mentioned was more than I'd expected. Had they upgraded the graphics (which I didn't think they had) or had they...
Yep. This confirms my guess that they'd simply squeezed more letters into the same 256 x 192 display, using a 5x8 font instead of 8x8.
(Back in the day I had a utility for my Atari 800XL that did something similar, squeezing 80 columns into a 320 x 192 graphic display using a 4x8(!) font, but I wouldn't seriously try to argue that was a proper 80 column display).
Probably a workable compromise for those who wanted a +3/Speccy anyway, and treated CP/M support as a bonus. But I'd definitely have wanted the PCW with its "true" 80 column display if I was planning on using it for anything serious.