Amstrad NC100

By 1992, once fast-growing Amstrad was struggling. Its reputation as a PC maker had been undermined by a batch of dodgy Seagate disk drives at the same time that bigger-name vendors were engaged in a price war, squeezing Amstrad out of the market.

The NC 100, NC 150 and NC 200 were three products that its founder Alan Sugar was hoping would help revive the company's fortunes.

Cutting edge, they were not. Both were based on old eight-bit Zilog Z80 microprocessors. Curiously, both machines came with a BBC Basic interpreter on which users could develop their own applications.

The NC 100 was a £199 notebook computer the size of a piece of A4 paper, with a full size keyboard and a "letterbox" screen at the top, offering 80 columns by 8 lines.

It had an RS232 serial port and a Centronics parallel port for printer and communications. Built-in were 64 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 1 megabyte with the addition of an add-on memory card.

"If you can't use this new computer in five minutes, you'll get your money back," boasted the company in its launch advertising. For ease of use, it had four colour-coded keys giving instant access to a number of built-in applications, including a word processor, calculator, diary and address book.

 

Thanks to www.oldcomputers.net for the photograph