This was also our first family pc. Single 5.25”, 20MB HD, EVGA. They are said to be poorly made machines but we never said a single thing go wrong. My dad used it for about 15 years. Still have it to this day.
The one im restoring now works flawlessly. I have a much later 386 Amstrad Deaktop Pc. you can see where they went wrong. The one we have is plastic which has held up flawlessly if stored ok. the keyboard is good, the HDD and FDD work well and the monitor is clear. The hdd is suffering but im trying to back it up. Thats a nightmare.
My family’s first computer in 1986 or 1987 was an Amstrad 1512, exactly this model with the CGA colour screen and the dual floppy drives and no hard drive. Deep memories.
seeing the rainbow of floppies at 4:33 gave me a flashback to when i used the Amstrad. My first ever PC. I too used the C Prompt and first learned to use CLI on the Amstrad
My first PC with a color monitor and 20HDD. Few months after getting it my father purchased me a memory upgrade to 640K. One of the few pc compatibles of the time featuring an 8Mhz 8086 it was quite capable. And guess what.. it still works in 2018.
I spent many years a kid with this machine - we had the model with the CGA monitor and the 20MB hard drive occupying the left drive bay. Lots of games and apps too - the original pre-VGA Sierra AGI/SCI games, a few Sesame street games, Blockout, Tetris, Sokoban, Rockford, Conquest (a clone of Joust), Microsoft Paintbrush (a rebranded version of ZSoft Paintbrush and the predecessor to Paintbrush in Windows 3.1, which later became MS Paint), Test Drive, the Goldengate office suite, and various others. Never used GEM - ours booted straight into a DOS-based menu program (Direct Access) Other memories included the volume knob on the left side (by the keyboard/mouse ports), and playing with the sync knob on the back of the monitor to make the picture go crazy. Ultimately we gave it to my cousin when we got a brand new 486/50 machine, but we never saw it again after that.
In 1990 there was a computer club in my location, and there were two Amstrads there, just like this in video. It was my first PC I ever touched. And I couldn't even distinguish different kinds of computers back then. I had no idea about processor or software or anything. We just played GAMES. =) Karateka, Digger, Xonix, Badstreet, Paratrooper.... Later this computers were replaced with Spectrum clones.
Respect! After using the BBC, this was the first ever PC-compatible I used, and this time at work. I learned a ton of stuff on it, apart from just using Wordstar. e.g. Writing an extensive, multi-windowed database (in DOS). Never ever used Gem or the mouse. Played several games to death: LS larry, Police Quest, thon 3-D tumbling-down version of Tetris, and several more that were free on Spanish mags. Took me a year or two to convince the boss we should get a hard drive card and a mem expansion (to 640k). ****The most important program of all was Norton Commander.**** I mean, fuck all that typing into DOS.
This was my first pc too with the hard drive and spent way to much time on alleycat and digger. I'm amazed these things still work after all this time!
my amstrad used 4 AA batteries for the system clock. Stored right under the montior, in the cut out made for the base of the monitor... i still trip out on that and often tell my students about it. it was the weirdest thing, ever.
Seen the 1512 not long ago last 10 years I think but those colour disks that brought back some memories 30 plus years ago as swaping disks went when the 20hhd was installed. Time spent playing Double Dragon on the family's first PC 😉
I've reparied a lot of Amstrads back in the day... The Amstrad 2386 was the best 80386. It shipped with cache RAM so it ended up a lot faster than all other shipping 386 machines.
Good lord it's been awhile.. that was my first PC too.. GEM I remeber very well, eventually got a sound blaster card and 10meg hard drive.. Modem and early BBS's back then..IRC..so on and so forth. Explaining the internet to people I just got blank stares..
That was really expensive. Home computers were like the ZX Spectrum. The PC 1512 was only found in businesses or extremely rich people's homes. I remember using one back then, on a training course I was on to help create a presentation.
No reason to worry about the battery leaking on the motherboard with the 1512. The battery is 4 AAs under the monitor. Even if something got inside the case there is still a metal plate over the motherboard.
8:58 IIRC, the first Gem prompt didn't actually require you to change disks. You just clicked "OK" to let it finish loading disk one, then prompted for disk two.
I remember these machines were installed at secondary school at around 1989/90 to replace the older BBC Micros and the main characteristic I remember was the loud “boop boop boop” sound whilst booting up. As a teenager at the time wouldn’t exactly call them a fun computer, especially compared with the C64, Amiga, Spectrums etc. we used at home.
Thank you for this. Just the same, lift your monitor, underneath, there they are 4 AA batteries, there's your concern. I have this very thing but with the HD 20 MB as you said. Don't have the MCGA monitor but working on a VGA conversion kit. So great to see the baby in action.
One of my teachers told me that he threw one of these away last year. He just didn't know that such old machines were valuable. Terrible shame, I could have gotten hold of it.
Totally love this - had exactly the same model as Tom (with the 20MB drive). Also have a CPC micro before with a 3" floppy drive but can't remember quite which model. Agree re the font too, perhaps it was the change with the slightly newer HDD model.
Ha! nostalgia here as well. I need to break out the old Atari 1024 and start me up some GEM! I remember the SPEECH.TOS program that produced nice and robotty voices, and hours and hours spent fiddling in Cubase creating MIDI files. Hardware MIDI ports, mind you. And a 20Mb drive I believe.
Love this! My first PC experience was with an Amstrad PC1640. I remember a DOS paint program called Dr Halo. Also, didn't these machines have have an option to display upto 16 colours at certain resolutions?
My First PC ! PC-CM on the monitor, if i'm right stands for "PC Colour Monitor" ? 11:53 The manual 📚 The first command I always type on a DOS prompt is CLS 😂
Only ever saw this on display in Dixons... passers by used to stand around as I played around with MS-DOS... things got more interesting when we started visiting the store after school to stuff bootlegged game and demo disks into the thing to bring it alive... we could never understand why Dixons left them sitting on the DOS prompt... needless to say we were eventually booted out and banned from the store 😏
Funny you say that. There was one of these on display in my local tandy back in the day. I used run the dir/w/p command on it and all the passers by and staff thought i was some kind of computer whiz kid or hacker lol
wow. this really is nostalgia overdose! our first PC, and back in the days i sometimes thought it was just some cheap piece of sh*t as some of my friends already had like 286 and EGA etc. ;) .. and it is more than 30 years later that i find out that this PC was quite popular in europe! ... i wish i could try and boot it up right now but unfortunately we tossed it away many many years ago... :(
9:55 "label ripped off and re-applied"... 13:13 "crossed out" When my dad bought a C64, he always numbered the tapes and later the disks and keep a separate list of their contents. When I bought my first computer, an Amiga 500, I did the same thing right from the start to keep the disks neat and tidy. No crossing out, no glue marks of old labels, nothing. Just one number that would serve me from the day I bought the disk until the day it would fail.
These machines actually had 16 colours at 640x200 all at the same time. They had 64kb of video memory, unlike the usual 16kb of the (4 colour) CGA adapter. It's a shame you didn't run Gem Paint or you would have seen that.
I had the 4 colors and I was happy I didn't have the Hercules card with monotone. But I have to admit I had a pretty good imagination as a kid.I was imagining the other 12 colors. Until the 64 colors came along and I had to imagine more colors lol
I thought the batteries were located in the lid of the base unit. All you had to do was lift the monitor up in the air and you would see 4 x AA batteries in the base unit lid.
They are purely for the RTC, the machine runs fine without them (the one in this video presumably didn't have them fitted either judging by the prompt on boot)
The 1512 was iconic. It wasn't overly unpleasant however its issue was that the PC/AT was already out. It was outdated before release. It was therefore very limited in what it could do.
cjmillsnun agreed outdated on launch, which is why it didn't register with me much at the time, had access to them, chose not to use them. Cpc and pcw though weaker had greater impact.
@@cjmillsnun The prices were logarithmic back then. You had your TurboXTs like this one for $700, AT clones for $2500 and 386s for like $5000 (16MHz only, with the crappy ISA bus).
@ in front of a line in a batch file, e.g., AUTOEXEC.BAT, would hide the line, i.e., @ECHO OFF would hide ECHO OFF - may not have worked in the first versions of MS-DOS ;-)
This was also our first family pc. Single 5.25”, 20MB HD, EVGA. They are said to be poorly made machines but we never said a single thing go wrong. My dad used it for about 15 years. Still have it to this day.
The one im restoring now works flawlessly. I have a much later 386 Amstrad Deaktop Pc. you can see where they went wrong. The one we have is plastic which has held up flawlessly if stored ok. the keyboard is good, the HDD and FDD work well and the monitor is clear. The hdd is suffering but im trying to back it up. Thats a nightmare.
My family’s first computer in 1986 or 1987 was an Amstrad 1512, exactly this model with the CGA colour screen and the dual floppy drives and no hard drive. Deep memories.
same model for me
I always wanted one of these as a kid but couldn't afford it. Marvelous peice of kit.
seeing the rainbow of floppies at 4:33 gave me a flashback to when i used the Amstrad. My first ever PC. I too used the C Prompt and first learned to use CLI on the Amstrad
My first PC with a color monitor and 20HDD. Few months after getting it my father purchased me a memory upgrade to 640K. One of the few pc compatibles of the time featuring an 8Mhz 8086 it was quite capable. And guess what.. it still works in 2018.
I spent many years a kid with this machine - we had the model with the CGA monitor and the 20MB hard drive occupying the left drive bay. Lots of games and apps too - the original pre-VGA Sierra AGI/SCI games, a few Sesame street games, Blockout, Tetris, Sokoban, Rockford, Conquest (a clone of Joust), Microsoft Paintbrush (a rebranded version of ZSoft Paintbrush and the predecessor to Paintbrush in Windows 3.1, which later became MS Paint), Test Drive, the Goldengate office suite, and various others. Never used GEM - ours booted straight into a DOS-based menu program (Direct Access)
Other memories included the volume knob on the left side (by the keyboard/mouse ports), and playing with the sync knob on the back of the monitor to make the picture go crazy.
Ultimately we gave it to my cousin when we got a brand new 486/50 machine, but we never saw it again after that.
In 1990 there was a computer club in my location, and there were two Amstrads there, just like this in video. It was my first PC I ever touched. And I couldn't even distinguish different kinds of computers back then. I had no idea about processor or software or anything. We just played GAMES. =) Karateka, Digger, Xonix, Badstreet, Paratrooper....
Later this computers were replaced with Spectrum clones.
Repaired and upgraded an absolute tonne of these back in the day! STK IC's used to fail for fun in the EGA monitors.
Respect! After using the BBC, this was the first ever PC-compatible I used, and this time at work. I learned a ton of stuff on it, apart from just using Wordstar. e.g. Writing an extensive, multi-windowed database (in DOS). Never ever used Gem or the mouse. Played several games to death: LS larry, Police Quest, thon 3-D tumbling-down version of Tetris, and several more that were free on Spanish mags. Took me a year or two to convince the boss we should get a hard drive card and a mem expansion (to 640k). ****The most important program of all was Norton Commander.**** I mean, fuck all that typing into DOS.
This was my first pc too with the hard drive and spent way to much time on alleycat and digger. I'm amazed these things still work after all this time!
Richard J me too. Sopwith? Dambusters?
OMG I had all of these games, and the Bruce Lee one :D
ua-cam.com/video/l0yQfyJlqdA/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/-rDFHoFE9w4/v-deo.html
I remember my Dad having one of them. Loved it. :)
my amstrad used 4 AA batteries for the system clock. Stored right under the montior, in the cut out made for the base of the monitor... i still trip out on that and often tell my students about it. it was the weirdest thing, ever.
At least those were not a leaky NiCad accumulator many PCs used back then.
20 years later me sitting at a windows xp computer being like this
Seen the 1512 not long ago last 10 years I think but those colour disks that brought back some memories 30 plus years ago as swaping disks went when the 20hhd was installed. Time spent playing Double Dragon on the family's first PC 😉
Wow, that CRT whine, please put a low pass filter on that for the cats who are watching this video.
I've reparied a lot of Amstrads back in the day...
The Amstrad 2386 was the best 80386. It shipped with cache RAM so it ended up a lot faster than all other shipping 386 machines.
Antony T Curtis I've got one
Cool... Still works?
Yep, my first computer. 16 shades of grey, twin floppies, MS-DOS only. No hard disk. Extraordinary. £499 was *a lot*.
Compared to any other DOS PC it wasn't. It was the cheapest PC at the time by about £1000.
Good lord it's been awhile.. that was my first PC too.. GEM I remeber very well, eventually got a sound blaster card and 10meg hard drive.. Modem and early BBS's back then..IRC..so on and so forth. Explaining the internet to people I just got blank stares..
That was really expensive. Home computers were like the ZX Spectrum. The PC 1512 was only found in businesses or extremely rich people's homes. I remember using one back then, on a training course I was on to help create a presentation.
No reason to worry about the battery leaking on the motherboard with the 1512. The battery is 4 AAs under the monitor. Even if something got inside the case there is still a metal plate over the motherboard.
8:58 IIRC, the first Gem prompt didn't actually require you to change disks. You just clicked "OK" to let it finish loading disk one, then prompted for disk two.
Prompt $p$g would turn the prompt into something that C:\> resembled.
That's what I was expecting Tom to type but the time and date trick is cool too (if you have a battery).
C>
That was the 1st pc i got to use when i was a kid and played lemmings.
i also created a program for a french project using batch files. would display images and information from text tiles.
I remember these machines were installed at secondary school at around 1989/90 to replace the older BBC Micros and the main characteristic I remember was the loud “boop boop boop” sound whilst booting up. As a teenager at the time wouldn’t exactly call them a fun computer, especially compared with the C64, Amiga, Spectrums etc. we used at home.
Thank you for this. Just the same, lift your monitor, underneath, there they are 4 AA batteries, there's your concern. I have this very thing but with the HD 20 MB as you said. Don't have the MCGA monitor but working on a VGA conversion kit. So great to see the baby in action.
5:04 The save icon is a 3.5" floppy disk, not a 5.25" floppy disk.
One of my teachers told me that he threw one of these away last year. He just didn't know that such old machines were valuable. Terrible shame, I could have gotten hold of it.
Totally love this - had exactly the same model as Tom (with the 20MB drive). Also have a CPC micro before with a 3" floppy drive but can't remember quite which model. Agree re the font too, perhaps it was the change with the slightly newer HDD model.
Got this for Christmas of 1986 after we sold our Apple 2C (from 1984-1986)!!!!!!
Ha! nostalgia here as well. I need to break out the old Atari 1024 and start me up some GEM!
I remember the SPEECH.TOS program that produced nice and robotty voices, and hours and hours spent fiddling in Cubase creating MIDI files.
Hardware MIDI ports, mind you. And a 20Mb drive I believe.
Excellent. I have one of these.
I suspect I'd feel the same if I got to play with a Windows 3.11 PC.
There's apparently a fifth disk for setting up the hard disk, on a machine that came with one.
And the RAM drive was D:, that is if you had the space and wanted to get around swapping disk.
Prompt $p$g?
Love this! My first PC experience was with an Amstrad PC1640. I remember a DOS paint program called Dr Halo. Also, didn't these machines have have an option to display upto 16 colours at certain resolutions?
DevilishDesign cool :) our machine was EVGA (16 colours) if the application or game supported it
You're quite correct the 1512 could display a 16 colour mode as opposed to normal CGA. But only GEM supported it.
My First PC ! PC-CM on the monitor, if i'm right stands for "PC Colour Monitor" ? 11:53 The manual 📚
The first command I always type on a DOS prompt is CLS 😂
Only ever saw this on display in Dixons... passers by used to stand around as I played around with MS-DOS... things got more interesting when we started visiting the store after school to stuff bootlegged game and demo disks into the thing to bring it alive...
we could never understand why Dixons left them sitting on the DOS prompt...
needless to say we were eventually booted out and banned from the store 😏
Funny you say that. There was one of these on display in my local tandy back in the day. I used run the dir/w/p command on it and all the passers by and staff thought i was some kind of computer whiz kid or hacker lol
my first computer!
wow. this really is nostalgia overdose! our first PC, and back in the days i sometimes thought it was just some cheap piece of sh*t as some of my friends already had like 286 and EGA etc. ;) .. and it is more than 30 years later that i find out that this PC was quite popular in europe! ... i wish i could try and boot it up right now but unfortunately we tossed it away many many years ago... :(
Wonderful
My first computer too!! 😁😁😁
9:55 "label ripped off and re-applied"... 13:13 "crossed out"
When my dad bought a C64, he always numbered the tapes and later the disks and keep a separate list of their contents. When I bought my first computer, an Amiga 500, I did the same thing right from the start to keep the disks neat and tidy. No crossing out, no glue marks of old labels, nothing. Just one number that would serve me from the day I bought the disk until the day it would fail.
i drew a fire-breathing dragon in paint!!!!
It took me fucking DAYS!!!!
10:10 No, the flopies weren't single sided. They were 360K double sided/double density. It's 3.5" floppies DD that were 720K when formatted.
Mine had just a single floppy, grey-scale monitor and no HDD. Ultra Poverty Level.
These machines actually had 16 colours at 640x200 all at the same time. They had 64kb of video memory, unlike the usual 16kb of the (4 colour) CGA adapter. It's a shame you didn't run Gem Paint or you would have seen that.
I had the 4 colors and I was happy I didn't have the Hercules card with monotone. But I have to admit I had a pretty good imagination as a kid.I was imagining the other 12 colors. Until the 64 colors came along and I had to imagine more colors lol
Im trying to restore one of these. backing up the hdd has been a nightmare for me. I need a 3d printable model of the side ISA card door :) wink wink
I thought the batteries were located in the lid of the base unit. All you had to do was lift the monitor up in the air and you would see 4 x AA batteries in the base unit lid.
Joe Farr Yeah they are. :)
Joe Farr they are to power the machine or only for the cmos? I need to remove all batteries from my 1640 after hearing this video
They are purely for the RTC, the machine runs fine without them (the one in this video presumably didn't have them fitted either judging by the prompt on boot)
Thanks. I know there are some AA batteries in the base. But is there a cmos battery also?
I'm 99% certain that those AAs are all there is
11:53 Strongbad!
Poor floppy disk :'(
I cringed every time they pulled the disk out while the drive was still running (which was quite often!)
Saw it at a trade-show back then. The Amstrad with GEM was rubbish. I had an Atari ST which was way faster.
Jesus, Tom talks a lot.
Pc1512 was an awful machine, nostalgia for you guys as a first machine put to one side, it did cut cost but it was unpleasant, it was no cpc6128.
The 1512 was iconic. It wasn't overly unpleasant however its issue was that the PC/AT was already out. It was outdated before release. It was therefore very limited in what it could do.
cjmillsnun agreed outdated on launch, which is why it didn't register with me much at the time, had access to them, chose not to use them. Cpc and pcw though weaker had greater impact.
@@cjmillsnun The prices were logarithmic back then. You had your TurboXTs like this one for $700, AT clones for $2500 and 386s for like $5000 (16MHz only, with the crappy ISA bus).
Too much gassing and not enough demonstrating the PC.
It's just a TurboXT with a Plantronics card and several character sets in video ROM. Unusual, but not unique.
You know it's not nice to be constantly pointing your finger and also talking over the other person is damn annoying.
@ in front of a line in a batch file, e.g., AUTOEXEC.BAT, would hide the line, i.e., @ECHO OFF would hide ECHO OFF - may not have worked in the first versions of MS-DOS ;-)