Amstrad
| Amstrad Plc
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| legal form | Public Limited Company |
| founding | 1968 |
| Seat | Essex , UK |
| management | Alan Sugar (Chairman and CEO ) |
| Number of employees | 85 (2005) |
| sales | £ 91.65 million (2006) |
| Branch | Information technology |
| Website | www.amstrad.com |
The British computer company Amstrad was founded in 1968 by Alan Sugar and started out as a trading company for all types of electrical goods. The name Amstrad stands for A lan M ichael S ugar Trad ing.
The company was best known for its CPC (Color Personal Computer) series of home computers , which was marketed under its own name in Germany by the Schneider Computer Division in Türkheim.
Amstrad bought the company Sinclair Research in 1986 and launched two successor models of its ZX Spectrum 128 under its name, each of which had a cassette or disk drive integrated into the housing (as in its own CPC 464, 664 and 6128).
After the advent of the IBM PCs and some computers in this field, the new market, which was largely based on modular systems, was withdrawn.
Other products of the company came from the brown area : Hi-Fi, entertainment electronics, household electronics. Highly developed e-mail-capable video telephones were also sold here alongside TV satellite technology. The German division of Amstrad was taken over by Metabox AG in 1999 .
On July 31, 2007, the British pay-TV provider BSkyB took over Amstrad completely. Videophone production was discontinued in 2011 and satellite receivers are still being manufactured for BSkyB and Sky Italia .
Amstrad computer models (selection)
- the CPC family of home computers
- the PCW series ( Joyce , writing systems based on CP / M )
- the NC notepad series: NC100, NC150, NC200
- the late Sinclair home computer range:
- Spectrum 2+ (Spectrum 2, 2+, 2 + A and 2 + B, 2.2)
- Spectrum 3+
- the PPC640D or PPC512 , early notebooks with a large keyboard, half-size LC display and ten batteries. MS-DOS with Amstrad extensions.
- the PDA600 - a very early Organizers in Newton style
- the PC1512 or PC1640 , IBM-PC-compatible complete systems, optionally with two floppy disk drives or one floppy disk and one hard disk drive ( CP / M , DOS-compatible, some supplied with other systems)
- the PC20 , a small IBM compatible one in the Amiga / Atari ST type housing. MS-DOS and GEM . Also marketed under the name Sinclair.
- the Mega PC , a slim IBM-compatible PC with an integrated Sega Mega Drive game console , can be moved by moving the front panel. The hardware of the respective other system was also used.
- the ACL 286 and ACL 386 as well as ALT 286 and ALT 386 , laptop systems with Intel 80286 and 80386 processors.
Web links
- Official Website of Amstrad (English)