CPCWiki forum

Have you raised money for any? 
Or did you fall in love when you got it? 
Did any of you change 464 to 6128 or plus in the retro era?

BTW. Apparently 3 million objects of our desires were produced. 
But how many were allocated to each model? 
Can you say that 6128 or 464 was rarer?

When my hands placed their fingers over the keyboard of my CPC 6128 Plus or maybe as soon as I saw its design it was love at first sight  :D :D :D

CPC 6128 forever ! ;D 

for me of course.  ;)

6128 Plus! The first computer I bought with my own money brand new back in 1990!!

464. Could not believe it when I got back from school one day and it was waiting for me there on my bed!

My love back in the day was for a 464, I loved those colours and loved the full keyboard and cursor keys when programming.

After owning a 464 for 6-12 months I started looking at and became more interested in the 6128, that was the machine I wanted but couldn't afford it.

I now have a 6128, I would love to have a 464 but space is at a premium 😞

@McArti0 - 2 million - 464
1 million - 6128
1 million - all Schneider CPC
250 000 - all Pluses
15 000 - 664
15 000 - GX4000
about 1 million - DDI + FD1
8 million - all PCWs

Most of these numbers are from Alan Sugar's first book. I just don't know if these Schneiders count in these 464 and 6128 or not. Although I tend to believe that they don't, meaning there were over 4 million CPCs, but I won't fight other opinions because they may be right.

In my opinion, the 664 is one of the ugliest computer in history, and the 464 is not far behind it, and on top of that, a tape recorder is masochism. Pluses are terribly expensive because for a 6128+ with mono you could buy an Atari ST, and for a version with color you could even buy an Amiga. And on top of that, this miserable amount of software for Pluses.

But 6128 was my love at first sight when I saw ad in magazine. But it took me 7 years to get myself enough money, because my folks wouldn't get me. Green for start, color TV after 2 years, 1 year later 5.25' and ST mouse. :)

Quote from: ZorrO on 07:38, 08 September 24Most of these numbers are from Alan Sugar's first book. I just don't know if these Schneiders count in these 464 and 6128 or not. Although I tend to believe that they don't, meaning there were over 4 million CPCs, 

There remains the question of the remaining 6 brands.
Orion, Awa, Solavox, Saisho, Triump, Isp.
Basically the question is how many factories there were and does Alan write about all of them?

Awa was an Australian distributor of Amstrads, but they were sold as Amstrads. Maybe some Australian knows how many of them were sold there, but they probably weren't counted separately.

Solavox is an Italian company, but the only 4 units that forum members here have, are Spanish.

And the other companies cooperated with Amstrad on Radio/TV equipment, and could potentially sell CPCs, hence their names in ROM. Japan/Korean Orion, for example, supplied them with CRTs.

My first Amstarad has fab Made in Ireland.

Now i have Ams: Made in Korea.

The 464 was my first computer and the 6128 was my second. I played more games on the 464 and did more programming and art on the 6128. I spent a good few years with each.

I have a 6128 and a 464 plus now, and although to me the 6128 is probably the one, I would still like to get a 464 with a green monitor like my first one someday. Looking back, I had a lot of games on cassette for the 464. I don't think I'll ever be as excited about something again.

For the 464. The coloured keys are so awesome! And if you open it, you find the tiniest, cheapest and emptiest of PCB's, yet it was able to deliver so much. It earns many point for having such beautiful, flexible and simple hardware design. Sure the tape deck is crappy, but having a hump on the right side affects all models, and having a floppy there is not much better.

For me the 6128, because I have many happy memories of playing games of the disk drive, thanks to a Multiface II.
However, I also have a soft spot for my Dad's PCW9512, which was great for writing school projects on. We even had a black and white hand scanner for importing drawings and artwork.

I don't understand how this thread can become "X, Y or Z is the best", the question was VERY clear. And it gets annoying real fast. 

Especially since the 464 is the best by far.

Quote from: Gryzor on 13:30, 08 September 24I don't understand how this thread can become "X, Y or Z is the best", the question was VERY clear. And it gets annoying real fast.

I totally agree.  :)

For me, I did not cite the CPC 6128 for a technical performance story.

I mentioned it as a matter of course : because it was my very first computer at home, the one with which I experienced the most joy, pleasure and sharing with friends. I discovered thousands of games there. I was very young, I started Basic, CP/M, Pascal, then Assembler. Of all the 8/16/32 bit computers or PCs that I could have had later, the CPC 6128 remains for me on the very first step : for sentimental reasons and happy memories of adolescence.

Of course the CPC 464 remains an obvious choice at that time with its unique design, its colors, its technical characteristics, its integrated cassette player.
It was incredibly ingenious when it came out. But I never knew/owned it.

Quote from: McArti0 on 16:10, 07 September 24Have you raised money for any?
Or did you fall in love when you got it?
Did any of you change 464 to 6128 or plus in the retro era?

BTW. Apparently 3 million objects of our desires were produced.
But how many were allocated to each model? 
Can you say that 6128 or 464 was rarer?

Like many things in life, you never forget your first. Mine was a 464 (the same one I still own now). I had to raise 50% of the price, the rest being funded by my father. I mowed every lawn in the neighbourhood to raise the cash. I didn't upgrade from the 464 until I switched to a PC, but I was young and wasn't ready for commitment, so later I was also spending time with an Atari 800XL in parallel. The two eventually even met up and were interfaced. ;)  All other retro computers that I own were bought after I got back into the hobby many many years later.

Bryce.

For me, it is the 6128+ as that's the first one I owned, having mostly been a spectrum user. I did pick up various other models second hand (a 464, 664 and 6128) but none of them quite have the same feel.

Quote from: andycadley on 09:14, 09 September 24For me, it is the 6128+ as that's the first one I owned, having mostly been a spectrum user. I did pick up various other models second hand (a 464, 664 and 6128) but none of them quite have the same feel.

That's going straight from a Zastava to a limo!

I first saw Plus on the website around 2000, looking for a cpc emulator. I smiled and thought what people would come up with.
For a few weeks I thought it was DIY.  :laugh:
Then I felt like looking for that "6128 converted to Amiga" again. And the shock came, this is a real Amstrad product. :o

6128 was my first.
Later I bought other models and played to others I missed at friends.
6128 is for me. Great keyboard orientation and feel. Fast drive and neat design.

For me it will always be the founding father of the family of CPCs, the good old CPC 464. I encountered it pretty early on, the 664 and 6128 were far from being announced and it had a huge impact while I was still in my very early state of geekdom. Locomotive Basic was a great playground for exploring graphics, sound, a bit of maths, strings and other data types, memory and bitmaps, basically like a kids version of CS education. Later, I repeated much of it using assembly language, diving into trickery and hand-written size or speed optimisations, learning more about memory, pointers, data structures, audio sampling and so much more. Apart from all of that I also enjoyed playing games, of course, but the learning part, exploring topics of my choice, as long and as deep as I wanted, was something that started on a CPC 464 - and hasn't stopped yet.

Like a kids' version of a CS education is right.

By the time I got to high school and could take computers as a subject, I had already read Roland Perry's excellent manual from cover to cover. And the teacher told me I already knew more about programming than they teach at a high school level, and in fact more than the teacher, and told me to take a different subject instead. They were using BBC BASIC which is extremely similar to Locomotive BASIC so it was all very familiar to me. So I dropped computers as a subject, because if you're really good at something apparently the teachers encourage you to quit, and that was that.

I tried picking it up again at university, and they didn't want to let me do CS101 because I was an art major, and everybody was telling me "you've made a mistake, you meant to enrol in computer STUDIES, this is PROGRAMMING". I did the first semester and aced it, but dropped out again because again, it was way too beginner level and I'd already learned all of this from Roland when I was ten, I didn't have time to take all the extra CS courses to get up to my level and they certainly weren't going to let me skip any.

So here's me sitting in a university lecture theatre listening to a guy going, "a variable is like a box you can put a number in. An ARRAY is like a whole row of boxes..."

Quote from: Gryzor on 09:27, 09 September 24

Quote from: andycadley on 09:14, 09 September 24For me, it is the 6128+ as that's the first one I owned, having mostly been a spectrum user. I did pick up various other models second hand (a 464, 664 and 6128) but none of them quite have the same feel.

That's going straight from a Zastava to a limo!

I don't know what either of those are.. and yet I know I'd fully agree with you if I did! :D

Bryce.

Despite having several Amstrad 8bit units (list in my signature), I'll always be a CPC464 guy, albeit with expansions.

Yes, it's a long chunky thing, but it'll always be my go to machine, be it the coloured tall key one, or the grey low key one. I'll even still wait a few minutes to load a game from tape these days.

(I must be going soft in my middle age!)

My friend had a 464, still remember the odd situation which lead him to becoming an Amstrad 464 owner which is a bit of a funny story, so it's playing games from tape on the 464 that I have the most nostalgia for. 

(I already got my home computer the Xmas before Amstrad announced they would be releasing a 464/664 machine so I never got one but I played hundreds of games with my best friend at his house almost on a daily basis....ahh the carefree school days of the 80s lol)

Quote from: 0ziris on 05:24, 16 December 24My friend had a 464, still remember the odd situation which lead him to becoming an Amstrad 464 owner which is a bit of a funny story

I can't be the only person now that's curious about this story now, surely?  :laugh:

Schneider CPC 6128

Some of my friends already owned a CPC 6128, one of them had a CPC 464, all Schneider Computers.
They visited computer lessons in school in the mid eighties.
I was given a CPC 6128 as a present because of good school marks back in 1987.
It was my first computer and because of that had a huge influence on me.
Unforgetable memories ...

QuoteI was given a CPC 6128 as a present because of good school marks back in 1987.

Wow! I was given a book voucher

Quote from: Anthony Flack on 20:55, 19 December 24Wow! I was given a book voucher

I don't think that did you any harm. ;)

My parents weren't rich.
But they realized my big interest for computers and the worldwide progression in the technology back then.
After getting the CPC 6128 I spent really much time with it for years.
And the good school marks went down for years just until I began my professional career.

Oh, from your parents? I thought you meant as a school prize.

No, that would have been crazy and the best school prize ever. :P
I wasn't good enough for getting a book voucher from school.
But good enough for getting a CPC 6128 from my parents.

But let's not go off-topic. ;)

Voted. It was really hard to choose! 

As a kid, I had the Amstrad CPC 6128, so that's the machine I decided to vote for. 

However, nowadays, I love the entire range of Amstrad 8-bit machines, from the CPC 464 to the Amstrad Plus -- it makes no difference to me.

Voted for 6128 as it was my first and only at the time.
But I would have a second love of GX4000 (seeing how it got zero), junky design but very good potential I think for gamedev. What could have been if utilized, especially the extra space in ROM.