<<Up     Contents

Amstrad PCW

The Amstrad PCW personal computer wordprocessor was a versatile machine pitched as a complete home/office solution, and came complete with a full-size word processor keyboard, high resolution green-screen monitor, dot-matrix printer, floppy disk drive, wordprocessing software and the CP/M operating system.

Several models were released. The PCW8256 featured 256 kilobytes of RAM and one three-inch floppy drive that could store 180 kilobytes on each side of the disk.

The PCW8512 came with 512 kilobytes of RAM and two three-inch floppy drives, the second of which could store 720 kilobytes on a double-density floppy without needing the disk to be turned over.

Subsequently, Amstrad released the PCW9512, which featured a white-screen monitor.

The machine was built around the Zilog Z80 processor, which managed the relatively large amount of RAM using a technique known as bank switching[?].

Although not a games machine, several games were released including Batman, Head Over Heels, and Bounder.

wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump