Speaking of the design and manufacture of the Amstrad CPC, architect of the machine, Roland Perry said, “We can make it twice as good if you spend another 5p on the components,” to the senior decision makers at the consumer electronics company back in the 1980’s.

And so they did!

“That’s where we’ve got the 27 colours from,” continues Roland.

“The 27 colours is six resistors! It’s absolutely nothing, it’s brain power, a very talented engineer who was on my team, but only six resistors.”

The interview

Roland Perry, who was responsible for the CPC development, was interviewed at our inaugural public meetup on the 21st June 2026.

The interviewed looked at what it was like working with Alan Sugar at Amstrad, including later being a consultant on the UK version of The Apprentice. Roland commented that Alan was:

“Very straightforward, plain speaking, honest… He in real life is absolutely the same as he is on that show, it’s not an act but it’s absolutely what he’s like”.

When taking his team to a Sinclair user show, Roland shared the vision of having an Amstrad version, which is team thought was just dreams. Low and behold, a year later Amstrad achieve that dream, “because everybody just threw their entire heart and effort” into the project.

Roland’s later work included being responsible for all those CompuServe and UK online CDs on magazine covers to get you on the internet, important work around the law for coercive control and more that you can see in our recording.

The video

You can watch the interview, hosted by our very own Jo Cook, including discussing the CPC mini and Roland’s advice for young programmers today.

If you want to see more videos of the day, just have a look the play list on our YouTube channel.

It was an honour and a pleasure having Roland with us on the day.

Transcript

Thank you to Nick Russell for the labour of love that was editing this transcript!

So without further ado, as they say in YouTube land, over to Roland Perry. Yes, our honorary president. Honorary means I’m not paid. Yes, because we’re all making so much money out of this event, Roland, many people, obviously, know you through the CPC and your Amstrad story.

But if we met in a garden somewhere, or a pub instead of a retro event, how would you introduce yourself these days? Well, I’d introduce myself as an antique dealer, who has a share in a community pub on the Cambridge-Essex border. Ok, and tell us a little bit more about that because that’s something quite recent for you, isn’t it? Well, I’ve always kind of not necessarily collected, but I’ve refrained from the throwing away, various artifacts from the 1980s, but more recently I’ve been trying to collect things.

Going to local auctions and house clearance and sales and things like that. And so I’ve got a little business, I think they call it a side hustle, something like that? Rachel Reeves wants to tax me, but you know, good luck with that. One of the things which I did soon after retirement from my main day job was to work in East Cambridge council, in a department, where some of my colleagues were responsible for communities of buildings of community assets of community interest, which were clubs, so pubs that want to close and turn themselves in sales of family home.

The council comes along and says, “We’re not going to give you a change of use planning permission for that because it still needs to be something to do with the community rather than just a family home.” And then, when one of those came up, after I’d left working for that department, one of them came up on the South Cambridgeshire border with Essex and I thought, “Well, this sounds like a good project to get involved in”, so I’ve been involved in that for two years now. I’ve been on television and all sorts of things like that. Pulling the first pint, I was unanimously voted onto the Management Committee last week and my next meeting is on Tuesday, so that’s one of my retirement jobs. That’s nothing at all to do with 8-bit computers, thank you very much.

But we all had lives around and extraneous to our 8-bit computers, but for many of us, me included, we can trace our lives back and our careers and things like that may be too having an 8-bit computer or that having a certain influence on our lives. And you’ve certainly heard from people in the past who say the CPC has changed their life. How does it feel, you know, some four decades later, for that to be the case and to be hearing those stories now? Well I’m very proud that so many people had a 464, or the later machines, bought for them and it started their career off in programming.

Mainly in software rather than in hardware or as my fiancee out there… who’s gone away. She’s a hardware person, but mainly in software and you know it just makes me so proud to see all these hundreds, maybe thousands of people who started their careers in programming by having an Amstrad, 8-bit computer for which I wrote a computer manual which was this thick and said, this isn’t just what it does but what you want to do with it and so here we are a generation later. And how many of you, let’s have a show of hands, would put yourself in that category of something like the CPC changed your life or was a big impact on your work and career?

Well I mean we’ve got a slightly biased audience I think, Roland, but for many of us it wasn’t just a computer we got for Christmas it’s something that’s really impacted what we do. And you’ve said here about you wrote this manual and your ambition for the CPC as I understand was much closer to something like the BBC Micro, which certainly in the UK was ubiquitous in schools. Lots of nods, OK, similar ages going on here I can see. From where did that vision come for you personally?

Well, because I’d, before I got involved in the Amstrad project, I’d been writing freelance for a computer… a public monthly publication doing reviews of all sorts of micros that turned up and I done quite an extensive review of the BBC micro which is a massively over-engineered, and in some sense, not a terribly useful computer. Although, those old computer mafia in Cambridge who would burn me at the stake for saying that! What I wanted was something where we could learn from the things they didn’t do as well as could have been done.

So we put together a proposal that turned out to be be the 464 and some people said this is going to be a game, it’s going to basically be a console, a games computer console, which happens to have a keyboard and a tape drive, and I thought well actually I’d prefer it to be something like an affordable BBC Microcomputer to teach people how to learn about computing but we managed to do all of them simultaneously. It’s like kind of spinning plates, you know, you see you just juggle it around. So that’s, I hope, what we did but I only was involved in the CPC project for about three years because then I moved on to PC compatibles and other stuff like that. And people will often ask me “What is your favourite CPC game?”.

So Roland, what is your favourite CPC game? Well the answer is I didn’t use to play them very much because I wasn’t a gamer. We used Harrier Attack on the prototypes to check the hardware worked. We had Indescomp turn up with Roland, that’s me, in the caves, and Roland, that’s me, doing something else.

And that was quite interesting, but I didn’t use to play them very much. But one day a chap from Gem software who happened to be just down the road, I think in Bishop’s Stortford, turned up and said “I’d like to write a game for the computer.”. And I said well come along, you know, here’s a desk in the corner, come along and do that. And that was Roland In Time.

So he wrote Rolnd In Time on a desk in the corner of my office, and every now and again, he would come along and say “What do you think about this?”. And I’d say “Well, it looks all right, you could try changing that and changing that, so he produced Roland In Time then about a year later he Roland In Space, which is probably my favorite game, because it’s got all the Doctor Who references in it. And about three years ago, it was referenced on the BBC’s Doctor Who programmme, because there was a scene on the BBC where the TARDIS landed in Isaac Newton’s Garden with a CPC as the console. Now I’m not a Doctor Who fan, but who here has seen that?

David Tennant comes out the TARDIS and he’s holding a CPC, wired to the TARDIS. Very nice, OK I didn’t know that. You learn something today; every day’s a school day. So speaking of kind of learning and you said about the manual that you created so the people could learn from that and you also put together the welcome tape.

Yeah, my job was to, as project manager, most of the engineering work was done by colleagues of mine because what I’ve always said is, if I could have designed the computer myself, it would have taken three years and we only had three months. I had to hire 10 other people to help me. And because most of them were very clever, very capable, and listened to what I said to them, we managed to get it done in this incredibly-accelerated timescale. And so, one of the things once we got the computer designed, that wasn’t the end of the project because lots of people designed a computer which was never going to sell to anybody because it didn’t have a user manual, it didn’t have any software, and it didn’t have a distribution channel.

So we got sucked into this whole thing about 50 games in Dixon’s on launch date and a manual and all sorts of other software, which just kind of completely consumed us for about two years afterwards. That’s the Amsoft thing, quite a lot of really capable, clever, loyal people who helped me do that but I’m very grateful. I know many of them today, unfortunately because I’m 73 … You don’t look a day over 72!

… a lot of my colleagues unfortunately are falling off their purchases at the moment so I’d like to get in contact with as many of them as possible, at least to say thank you for all the fish. So you said that working with Sir Alan Sugar was, I was going to use the word “easy”, perhaps that’s not the right word but that you were never in doubt about what you were supposed to be doing. Tell us a bit more about that.

Of course he wasn’t a “sir” then. Ok, Alan then. He was just just plain Alan Sugar and he’s very straightforward, plain speaking, honest. “I want you to do this, can you do it?”.

Most of the time I said “yes”. He said “Go and do it then”. We didn’t have to wait for three or four months for lawyer support, contracts, we just went often did it because we knew we’d get paid because at the time, Amstrad had a business model which was the complete opposite of GEC, which was the the other big, Alan Weinstock chairman. Their business model was you hire all these people to do things for you and paid them a three or four months later.

Amstrad’s business model was you hire people to do these things and you paid them a three or four days later, then they’re much more willing to work for you. And we could buy things from Japan, we could go to Japan and say “We’d like to buy a hundred thousand Z80 chips and we’re going to pay for them. And you were going to have the hundred thousand you weren’t just going to order a thousand were you. Whereas, Clive Sinclair, while I’ll never speak ill of the dead I suppose, he’d go to Japan and say “I want to buy a hundred thousand Z80 chips and he’d get delivered ten thousand of them and pay for five thousand of them, which pissed off the Japanese quite a lot.

Yeah, understandably. So when you were negotiating prices and, you know, you had this three-month timeline, were there any moments where the price pressure specifically nearly compromised the product? No, I didn’t negotiate the prices. That was people in Amstrad who’d been doing that job for decades.

They didn’t negotiate the prices. What I did was I said to them, this is the design for the computer we’ve got. We can make it twice as good if you spend another 5p on the components. OK, and how did that go down?

Usually fairly well. Because they trusted me, that when I said you got this computer you’re going to sell in Dixon’s for £300, which means you’re going to sell it to Dixon’s for £200, which means the factory in Japan’s going to sell it’s you for £150. You spend 5p more on some components and it’s going to be so much more attractive for your customers. That’s where we got the 27 colours from.

The 27 colours is six resistors. It’s absolutely nothing, it’s brain power, a very talented engineer who was on my team, but only six resistors. So this is something I think is really interesting about all the team that you had around you and all these talented people you were talking about, because Alan certainly in his autobiography says things about the boffins and how he’s not one of these kind of technical people and he talks about the Cambridge crowd quite a lot, even though his design team was full of this Cambridge crowd. How did that public persona compare to what you were working with?

It was very annoying because he decided to have this public persona which is, I’m the east-end barrow boy and I don’t understand computers and I don’t get on with Cambridge graduates. Except his entire business model was created by four or five or six Cambridge graduates. So, you know, we just had to bite our lip and say, “Well, we’re not going to criticize you in public.” He just had this completely different public persona to this private one when we were working together. Except on The Apprentice, if you watched that.

I was actually one of the consultants on the first episode of the apprentice, designing the tasks they did. He, in real life, is absolutely the same as he is on that show. It’s not an act but it’s absolutely what he’s like. And tell us more about getting involved in those tasks and working on The Apprentice.

Oh, all they did was they sent me a script, you know, storyboards, they called it in the industry. This is, we’re going to have this show, it’s going to have 10, 12 tasks. This is what they’re going to be, what do you think about that? And I said, well, this one you need to tune a bit, and that one you need to tune a bit, but apart from that, it’s reasonably good.

So we sent it all back, and that’s what created the first series of The Apprentice. The first series of The Apprentice was actually quite interesting, because it wasn’t just the first series in the world, because that was in the USA with that Trump man. You’ve probably heard of him. So they cloned it in the UK.

But every contestant on the first series of The Apprentice was at a crossroads in their life. They didn’t know what they were going to do next. So they thought, “Well, let’s apply to this game show and see what happens.”. And it was quite successful for many of them, not just the winner, but some of the, you know, runners-up also built a career based on that.

We’ve talked a little bit about the timeline, the teams you’ve had, you know, the costing, and all of that kind of stuff to do with the quality of the components. So you’ve obviously got quite a unique vantage point on that era of working for Amstrad. Is there anything that you wish the retro community would know or understand better about what it was like about how Amstrad really operated as a business at that time? You just need to understand that it was a community, OK?

It wasn’t just people working for an employer, because one of the things I did, I hired some people to be on my first team and about a month into the project. I hired a mini bus on a Sunday and drove them all to Alexandra Palace because there’s a Sinclair User Show. I said, “Come with me to this show and they all… they didn’t charge me over the time, they just said, “OK, we’ll come along.” And we went around the Sinclair User Show, whatever it was called, at Alexandra Palace, and I said, “One day we’ll have a show here which is bigger and better than this.” They all said, “You’re mad, never going to happen, you’re just dreaming.” And then about a year later, it was true, because everybody just threw their entire heart and effort, and everything they did into the project.

And if they didn’t throw everything about them into the project, then, “You’re fired!”. Go off and get a job with somebody else then. Nick Russell, who’s one of our co-organisers, has said, “You said you’re not much of a gamer. So what was your favorite software back in the day for the CPC?” Well, the one that was probably most influential was the welcome tape, because everyone forgot (he really likes his welcome tape!) Yeah, everyone forgot that it needed a welcome tape.

And so I said, “Well, I’m going to do a welcome tape.”. So I did it. There was nobody else who was going to. We’ve all worked in teams like that, I think, haven’t we.

And Vincente, I hope I’m saying our name correctly, has said, “Is there anything you would have changed in the original CPC design?” Well, this is one of these questions that everybody asks me at every one of these sessions and I’ve answered it 50 times, I’ve have made it a seven-bit printer port, because everyone keeps bitching and moaning at an 8-bit printer port, because everyone keeps bitching and moaning it’s only a 7-bit printer port. You are judging our “Machine of the Meet” today, and as you look around at what people have done with their machines, what horrifies you, and what impresses you about how the community is taking things way beyond your original design? None of the things have horrified me, it’s all delighted me. Ah, well, that’s not what he said to me earlier.

But no, that’s lovely. And to want to go a little bit beyond the CPC now, because as you, you often say, you know, that was a small part of your life, and you’ve had a slightly longer life, so it’s nice to celebrate some of the other things that you’ve done. And you talked about this PCW, and you told me earlier on that it’s a “6128 with better monocrome graphics”, is what I think you said to me, but built by the same team. What do you think the PCW got particularly right, for like, the ordinary user?

The main thing it got right was you could see an A4 letter on the screen, without scrolling sideways and up, down all the time. Plus, the software was designed by people who had been working on industrial-strength word processes previously, which is just a complete coincidence that it all fell into place. Yeah, and it was quite high-end, high-spec, machine, software. So it turned out to be a very high-spec word processor.

And when we were designing it, selling it originally, we thought “How long is it going to be before somebody else produces a clone that works better than this?”, as all these big American companies there’s these Japanese companies, they could just ride in and produce an IBM or a Sanyo or something else word processor, which was better than ours and cheaper than ours, and nobody ever did that, because we aced it the first time round, and nobody else could produce anything better. How many of you are PCW fans and had those back in the day, maybe? We certainly did. Does anybody have any of them now?

Oh, yeah, well obviously Simon does. There’s so many people who wrote their first novel, their first book, their first thesis on a PCW. Oh, and vicars who wrote their sermons on it. It was an absolutely great business machine, lovely.

You’ve spoken about your wife, and you and your wife, among many other things, helped pioneer, and I didn’t know this until talking to you, the cover CDs of CompuServe and UK Online. Did anybody have those cover CDs back in the day? Got on the internet a few of you. I still remember my CompuServe e-mail address was 106152,3157@compuserve.com [nerd alert!

–TN]. I don’t think it works though, so don’t try sending any emails to it. It was all about cutting acquisition costs, wasn’t it? And that was quite new, back then?

Yeah, back then, if you were a new business, startup business, in any sphere, for example, if you’re CompuServe, and you’re wanting to get new customers for your business, there’s a customer acquisition cost, which in those days, you had to do advertising, all sorts of other things, and it was about £40 or £50 a customer, which multiplied by 4 today, so it cost you £200 pounds to acquire a customer. And, but one of the cheaper ways to acquire a customer, was to put a cover disc on a magazine, all right? And so you draw people in – cover disc is free to the customer, it’s free to the magazine, so my wife was brilliant at the marketing in this, and she said, “OK, you need to stick a cover disc on the magazine with the biggest circulation in the UK, which at the time was… BBC Radio Times.

With circulation of, I don’t know, 8 or 10 million. Then all you have to do is prduce 8 or 10 million cover discs, ship them to the Radio Times printers, and they stick them on the cover, and it’s all in WH Smith’s or on to their subscribers. And it’s costs about a tenth as much to acquire a subscriber by doing that as doing conventional advertising, which is TV adverts, billboards, all sorts of other stuff that you’re doing. And your wife also had, she worked at Amstad for America, didn’t she?

Well, she was hired by Amstrad USA as their marketing manager, about a year before I met her. I still don’t understand why I didn’t bump into her for about a year, because it used to go over their quite a lot. I did eventually bump into her and I went to a trade show in April, I think it was Comdex Spring 1998. I went to the convention center, which is a bigger than Olympia or Earl’s Court, and I went in with Mark Simons, who’s Alan’s brother-in-law, and he’s married to Anne Simons, and he was at the time helping Amstrad Inc.

get set up. So I got sent over there just to help them get the booth set up, and my job was to go along just make sure everything works and everyone did what they were told, and I was stood there, I was on the balcony, mezzanine, overlooking the audience, overlooking the day on set up, and I said to Mark Simons, “Who’s that lady there who seems to be in charge of setting up the booth?” He said, “Oh, that’s Jennifer,” Then I said, “I’m taking her back home with me.” Was that in a suitcase, or a …? And so we all worked, you know, seven days a week, more than 12 hours a day. We just through everything we had at it, and it worked.

Well it certainly worked, we’ve still got the machines working now, so it’s a testament to that. And to bring us a little bit more up-to-date, a lovely prop here… So if you’ve never seen this, this is the CPC mini. How many of you have seen these?

Few of you have. So if you want to know more about it, speak to Simon who’s standing up at the back here. This is his one. He 3D printed and spent many hours and much swearing and doing all of the soldering in here.

So this is one that obviously you can do as a project yourself. It’s not one you can buy off the shelf. I would like to see that in the shops for £9.99. £9.99!?

Yeah, they’ll fly off the shelves. Tenner, Simon, will that do? For £9.99, yeah. So tell us more about how that could work.

Do you think that there would be a demand for it? I think there would be a demand for it. I don’t think there’s any electronics or hardware in it that you couldn’t, in sufficient quantity, manufacturer for about all £4-£5? Which means you could be £10 in the shops.

So, put your orders in with Roland! If you think about the younger generations now, you want to maybe build products or services or software. What kind of advice would you give them? I think I would encourage them if they wanted to learn about getting a foot hold in modern consumer electronics to buy a Raspberry Pi.

Because that was created by my great rivals at Acorn, but two decades later, and you can learn about it. You can design things nowadays, you can get an AI to write your software. You can probably today go to Gemini and say “Write me a CPC emulator for a Raspberry Pi”, and two minutes later it will give you all the code. Across everything you’ve done, is there anything you’ve done that you’re quietly most proud of?

I’m most proud of the work I did to protect vulnerable ladies from being killed by their husbands. Tell us more about that. Unfortunately, lots of ladies shack up with gentlemen who are not terribly sympathetic and they control them. It’s called ‘coercive control’.

Myself and my late wife wrote the law about coercive control in the UK and these gentlemen who they still turn up in news all the time, they treat their ladies as objects, not people, and they force them to do things like have babies and cook them dinner, and things like that. And I find that really quite unfortunate. So for a couple of years, one of our main jobs was not only introducing the legislation which makes that illegal, but also helping the ladies who had phoned up at 11 o’clock at night and say, “My husband says he’s going to kill me tomorrow morning if I don’t do what he tells me”. And we would then advise them what to do which is go to the Women’s Aid shelter in your town.

And they say, “Well how can I go to the Women’s Aid shelter in my town?”. And I said, “Call a taxi, any taxi, they know where the Women’s Aid shelter is. It will take you there and Women’s Aid will look after you.” And that was the bit that it just saved hundreds of lives, which I think is really important. That seems to be a theme from a lot of the stories that you’ve told is about just getting things down and working hard and getting things delivered.

And is that something that you find is a strength of yours through your work? It’s what I’m seeing. If you want something doing, persuade people to do it. I mean, when I was doing the software for the CPCs and the PCWs and the people at Locommotive, assisting me, going “Oh, it’s all a bit difficult.

We’ve got some bugs in this. We need to – it’s six o’clock on a Friday and when we need at least another four or five hours to talk this out. And I said, “OK, I’ll be down there at 10 o’clock this evening, then to pick it up when you finish.”. And I’d driving back and midnight.

You’ve got to keep the pace up. It’s not working a 40-hour week or a 35-hour week or bitching a morning about being paid only £80,000 a year to drive a train into the back of another one. You just need to get things done. So when we get things done and have our 20th anniversary of the UKAG meet-up, what do you hope – I will not be alive in 20 years’ time, I’m sorry about that!

What will people say in your memory? They’ll say he got things done. Perfect. Do we have some questions from the audience?

Did any other, major computer company try and poach you back in the 80s? No consumer companies, no. All of my customers when I worked from 1978 to 1982 doing small business computers, which basically multi-user today computers. Every single customer of mine tried to poach me, which got a bit tiresome after a while.

But no, no other consumer electronics company tried to coach me. But Sinclair had its own people. Acorn now it’s own people. I don’t know who else could have poached me.

Microsoft could have poached me, maybe? I don’t know. But they weren’t into home computers then. And I’ve just got one more thing as you are our honorary resident and we are very, very happy about that.

We just wanted to offer you a trophy just to say thank you for that. That will go in pride of place in my mancave at home. Fantastic. Thank you very much.

Thank you. So, Roland Perry, everybody, thank you very much.