Amstrad

Amstrad Consumer Electronics plc, usually known as Amstrad, is a company formed by Sir Alan Michael Sugar in the UK, and based in Brentwood in Essex, England. The name is a contraction of Alan Michael Sugar TRADing.

In 1984 the company launched the popular Amstrad CPC 464 home computer range in the UK, France and Germany (in Germany under the Schneider brand name), and also the business-orientated Amstrad PCW range, which was principally a word processor running the CP/M operating system and the LocoScript word processing program. The Amsoft division of Amstrad was set up to provide in-house software and consumables. Amstrad briefly entered the video game console business with the GX4000 based on the CPC Plus hardware which failed to catch on.

In 1988 Amstrad bought the home computer division of Sinclair Research and its ZX Spectrum. It launched two new variants of the Spectrum: the +2, with a built-in tape drive (like the CPC 464), and the +3, with a built-in floppy disk drive (like the CPC664 and 6128), taking the 3" disks that many Amstrad machines used.

The company moved with the times and produced a range of affordable MS-DOS based personal computers, the first of which was the PC-1512. Today, long ago having left the computer business, the company still trades electronic goods such as music hi-fi systems, satellite dishes, and an email-capable telephone called the E-m@iler (http://www.amstrad.com/emailer_plus.html).

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