- Person
- Alan Sugar
- Lived
- b. 1947
- Field
- Consumer electronics
- From
- British
The story
Alan Sugar was born in 1947 in Hackney, East London, into a Jewish family. In 1968, aged 21, he founded Amstrad with about £100 of savings, building it into a maker of low-cost hi-fi and electronics before moving into computers in the 1980s.
Sugar noticed that many people in Britain who bought home computers were using them mainly to type letters and documents. According to accounts of the machine's development, he sketched the basic idea for a cheap replacement for the typewriter, with everything needed in a single package, while travelling to the Far East.
The result was the Amstrad PCW 8256, launched in September 1985. For £399 plus VAT buyers got a monitor, with the processor, memory, disk drive and power supply built into its casing, a keyboard, a printer, and software that included the LocoScript word processor. At launch a PCW cost less than a quarter of the price of almost any IBM-compatible PC in Britain. A model with more memory and two disk drives, the PCW 8512, followed a few months later.
Because it came ready to use, the PCW drew in people who had never owned a computer. The Centre for Computing History describes it as very popular in homes and small offices in the UK and Europe, and says it helped many technophobes start using computers. Households and small businesses could produce typed letters and documents without buying an expensive office computer.
More than 700,000 were sold in the first two years, and by 1989 sales had reached 1.5 million. The range stayed in production until 1998, and across all models the series is reported to have sold about 8 million units. It was also sold in Europe under license by Schneider as the Joyce.
Later models struggled as IBM-compatible PCs became cheaper, but by then the PCW had already shown that a computer could be a simple, affordable tool for ordinary people rather than an expensive office purchase.
Why it matters
The PCW helped make word processing an everyday activity for households and small organisations, preparing a generation for the computers that later became standard in homes and workplaces.
About Alan Sugar
Hackney tailor’s son who founded Amstrad and put affordable home computers and word processors into millions of British homes, then gave generously to Jewish Care and children’s causes.
More about Alan Sugar
Sources
- Amstrad PCW Wikipedia
- Amstrad PCW 8256 Centre for Computing History
- Alan Sugar Wikipedia
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