On a rainy morning on 21st June 1984, me and my dad wandered down to our local branch of Rumbelows on the Edgware Road in North West London. As luck would have it, this was literally round the corner from where we lived. It also happened to be the public launch site for an era-defining home computer – one that had a profound effect on my life and career.
Yes, a lowly branch of Rumbelows was the place where Amstrad put the first stock of the CPC 464 on sale. It was a shop we knew well. In the pre-Amazon, pre-internet era, Rumbelows (along with Dixons and Currys) was where most of us bought electronics and home appliances. Over the years we bought TVs and a VCR from that same shop, as well as our vacuum cleaner and the Amstrad HiFi that for many years sat in the corner of the living room!
Money was tight, so we couldn’t afford the 464 with a colour monitor. To avoid keep having to use the main TV in the house every time I wanted to use it, the compromise was to get me a 464 with the smaller, cheaper green screen monitor. Even so, £200 was a lot of money in 1984 and I know that my parents had to make sacrifices to find it. I was absolutely over the moon with the new computer I came home with, a massive step up from the Sinclair ZX81 and 16K ZX Spectrum that my sister and I had shared previously.
Beginnings
That machine was the start of something quite profound for me. A “proper” computer rather than the innovative, but challenging devices that Sinclair produced, the Amstrad introduced me to a whole new world of possibilities, from games to serious software to showing me the potential for computers to change how we do everything. Its keyboard was the reason I leaned to type.
It’s also the machine that introduced me to computer programming. I wrote several games, including a couple of adventure games that I sold to Mastertronic, a budget label that paid good money back then for sellable games. Going into my local 7-Eleven on the corner of Church Street and the Edgware Road and seeing a game that I wrote on the little Mastertronic display carousel that was on the counter by the till was an incredible feeling. I did quite a bit of programming over the years on the CPC and other systems, less on games and more on serious software. I even did some work with Arnor, helping to develop the Protext-based software set for the Amstrad NC100 and NC200 Notepads. I eventually realised I enjoyed writing about computers more than I did writing software for them.
Being more proficient in computing use compared to most of my classmates (as well has having my own computer and not having to rely on a bank of poorly maintained BBC Micros at school), schoolwork was far less of a challenge.
By the time I got to my GCSEs I had moved on from my CPC 464 to a 464 Plus – and finally got a colour monitor! That 464 Plus, while not as successful as the original CPCs, is still my favourite of all the CPC range. I expanded it heavily, with a 64K RAM pack to take it to 128K RAM, added a disk drive interface along with 3inch and 3.5inch floppy drives (no longer having to save everything to tape was so good), an RS232 interface and my first modem (the 464 Plus was the first machine I went online with), as well as bringing across my ROMBO rombox from my original 464. I had to buy a new Multiface II for it, as the original didn’t work on Plus machines. I remember going to Romantic Robot’s premises one evening after school with a classmate to buy it and was surprised to discover that their “office” was in fact just a house in Wembley. There was some surprise when I showed up on their doorstep, but they happily furnished us both with the new Multifaces we were looking to buy.
Business-minded
Coursework was made simpler, and CPC-based GCSE revision tools from Kosmos Software gave me a huge advantage. I still remember creating some pretty amazing GCSE Business Studies coursework using Mini Office 2 to create pie charts and bar graphs that put my coursework on another level. I even created the first three issues of my school’s magazine on my 464 Plus using Micro Design. While writing English essays in Protext provided a writing environment where I could develop ideas and prose freely, rather than being forced into a narrow lane by writing everything longhand.
As a teenager I was already contributing pieces of work to several local newspapers where I had a syndicated computer games review column. I also wrote various articles including news and type-in software tutorials for Amstrad Action, before moving on to write for its sister title New Computer Express. It wasn’t long before that hobby became a career.
By the time I left school, I was already working for a national newspaper (Today). While I had moved on to other computers (namely the Amiga) by then, my interest in the CPC never went away. Moreover, the career I have as a journalist, the awards I’ve won for my work, my page layout and DTP skills that have helped launch and redesign several newspapers, magazines and web sites in the last 30 years all trace back to my origins the CPC and what I learned from using it.
The CPC stands as an example of how an affordable, innovative and versatile computer shaped my career, as well as my life-long obsession with technology.
Collecting
In later years I’ve been fortunate enough to rebuild my CPC collection and more. I now have a CPC 464 (sadly not my original one), a CPC 6128, two Schneider CPC 6128s (the German version of the machine), a 464 Plus (not my original one, which is now in the Computer History Museum in California), a 6128 Plus and a GX4000 (which is my original one from back in the day, that I bought for just £10 from Bull Electrical).
As I mentioned, I progressed from the CPC to the Amiga in the 90s. I always felt this was an appropriate path for a CPC user, the CPC being a platform with a real operating system in the form of CP/M Plus and serious capabilities alongside good games, the Amiga having Workbench/AmigaOS and similar non-gaming credibility alongside being a great games machine. I wrote for many Amiga magazines including Amiga Format, CU Amiga and Amiga Active, even did some development work on the later versions of Deluxe Paint for Electronic Arts. Again, the Amstrad CPC made that possible.
Kickstart
For the last three years I’ve been running the Kickstart Amiga User Group, something I’ve been involved with since 1997. After a long hiatus, we decided to resurrect physical meets for the group, in response to the growing interest in the retro computer scene and people’s desire to do things in-person again.
While Kickstart meets are predominantly Amiga-centric, people are always welcome to bring other machines (except Atari STs of course), and it soon became clear that we had a group of CPC enthusiasts within our Amiga community. That got several of us thinking: “With all this retro computing interest, why are there no CPC groups and meets?” So, we collectively decided to do something about it.
The UK Amstrad Group (UKAG) was born, with the aim of bringing together and supporting the Amstrad community in the UK in the same way that groups have done in France, Spain, Germany etc. Supported by the facilities, knowledge and infrastructure that Kickstart has amassed over the last few years, we are holding the first Amstrad computer user meet-up in the UK in a generation on 21st June 2026.
It is going to be an amazing day, with people including Roland Perry in attendance as well as our friends at Spanish CPC user group AUA coming as well. The day is a chance for Amstrad computer users to come together to show, share and use their machines, as well as see rare and interesting prototypes and custom builds. It’s a day to socialise, play games, share memories and have a lot of fun.
Written by:
Chris Green
