Amstrad CPC 464

Amstrad was known for cheap hi-fi products but had not broken into the home computer market until the CPC 464. Their consumer electronic sales were starting to plateau and owner and founder Alan Sugar stated "We needed to move on and find another sector or product to bring us back to profit growth". Work started on the Amstrad home computer in 1983 with engineer Ivor Spital who concluded that Amstrad should enter the home computer market, offering a product that integrated low-cost hardware to be sold at an affordable "impulse-purchase price".

Spital wanted to offer a device that would not commandeer the family TV but instead be an all-in-one computer with its own monitor, thus freeing up the TV and allowing others to play video games at the same time.

Bill Poel, General Manager of Amsoft (Amstrad's software division), said during the launch press release that if the computers were not on the shelves by the end of June, "I will be prepared to sit down and eat one in Trafalgar Square."

Technical specifications

The CPC 464 is powered by the Zilog Z80 processor after the original attempts to use the 6502 processor, being used in the Apple II amongst many other 8-bit computer families, failed. The Z80 runs at 4 MHz, has 64 KB of memory and runs AMSDOS, Amstrad's own OS. The unit includes a built-in tape drive and the choice of a colour or green monochrome monitor.

The graphics, which uses a Motorola 6845 chip for timing and address generation, provides 3 standard display modes, each using colours chosen from a palette of 27.

• Mode 0 - 160×200, 16 colours
• Mode 1 - 320×200, 4 colours
• Mode 2 - 640x200, 2 colours

Its sound is supplied using the General Instrument AY-3-8912 sound chip that provides 3-voice, 8-octave sound capacity through a built-in loudspeaker with volume control. Later versions of the 464 have a headphone jack that can also be used for external speakers.

The CPC 464's code name during development was 'Arnold'.