New to the CPC scene

[Liamob1]

Hi all,


I'm new to the CPC scene, I've always been interested in older tech, and I found this CPC464 in my hunt for a BBC Micro. I'm more than happy with this purchase instead. I picked this little bit of kit up for only £20 including colour screen, found under a table in a junk shop!


My question is, does anyone or has anyone tried to use there CPC as their standard PC? Like, word processing and spreadsheets? If so, how did it go? I'm interested to know if anyone still uses these as the "home work station" they marketed the stylish 464 as!

[keith56]

Hello and Welcome!

My question is, does anyone or has anyone tried to use there CPC as their standard PC? Like, word processing and spreadsheets? If so, how did it go? I'm interested to know if anyone still uses these as the "home work station" they marketed the stylish 464 as!

Back around 1990 when I was at school, we had a 464 with disk system and I used to use it for my homework - the machine was a hand-down from my Dad, and I remember we had Mini-Office 2, as he had bought it for working from home - he had upgraded from a ZX81, and later we bought a amstrad 1512 - not only did he use it for documents, but did software development on it, writing programs for his work.

I used the Word Processor, and I think I produced a few graphs in Mini-office's spreadsheet. It was pretty good for word processing , I don't remember much about the spreasheet, but I think it did what I wanted - I also remember using a DTP package which came with Amstrad Action - it was okayish - it could only do 1 page at a time, but I remember a few crashes which lost my work!

Mini-office would be terrible by modern standards, but back then it was great! no one else back then used word-processors for their school work - Its easy to forget that even if it looks basic now, back then it was something most people did not have access to.

My dad also used it for amateur music making, we had the "Amdrum" hardware add on, which he used with his synthesizer

I have a couple of CPC's now, but I only use them for testing and "special occasions" - I'd be worried how long they would last if I still used them every day! All my CPC development is done on Winape.

[arnoldemu]

My question is, does anyone or has anyone tried to use there CPC as their standard PC? Like, word processing and spreadsheets? If so, how did it go? I'm interested to know if anyone still uses these as the "home work station" they marketed the stylish 464 as!

Welcome!

Back in the 90's I used turbo pascal on a 6128 to write a university assignment. It went well and I got a good mark.

[Liamob1]

Wow! What a story, I love how this old tech became what we know today, yet back then it was futuristic madness. I love this kind of stuff!!

[keith56]

Wow! What a story, I love how this old tech became what we know today, yet back then it was futuristic madness. I love this kind of stuff!!

Indeed, but I think it's a shame how little people need to know these days - back in the 8 bit days, your computer started in basic - and so everyone was encouraged to learn a few commands - now everyone has a mobile phone with 2000x the power of the z80, but they can't even 'code' html - Thanks facebook!!

I work in IT now and do all kinds of programming in my Job these days - and that is 100% thanks to the CPC I started using when I was 6.

I'm glad to see the sucess of the Raspberry PI these days - a cheap PC you could buy for throw-away prices is exactly the kind of thing we need - all my computers were 'hand-me-downs' back in my youth, not everyone can afford the latest PC/Ipad etc.

[||C|-|E||]

Welcome!

Back in the days I used my CPC 6128, that came with a DMP 3000, for quite a lot of things. I was 9 at the time but I knew how to type pretty well because my parents started sending me to typewriting classes when I was 7. So yes, I was writing quite a lot of my school work on it and it was great because it was much faster than by hand. Sadly, I was not allowed to use it for everything, since the teachers wanted me to improve my handwriting (they failed miserably) and they knew that the computer had spell checkers. I kept on using the Amstrad this until almost 1996, when I was 15-16 and I got my first PC. Nowadays you could keep writing your documents in a CPC or a PCW, no problem at all. It would be slower, you would need to know quite a lot of shortcuts and you would not be doing the spellchecking on real time, but it would be still 100 times better than a traditional typewriter.  In general, if you do not need internet connection there are a lot of things you can still do with one of our beloved machines. Problem is that, given the price of a computer like the Raspberry Pi, it is not practical unless you have nostalgic reasons .