Monday, April 29, 2013

My Micro Life (5) : Amstrad PPC512DD

We have now reached 1990 in the story of my microcomputers growing up and by now i was a student at Birmingham Polytechnic. More importantly I now had money (you see back in the past we actually got paid to be students and got all of our course fees paid!) and of course i wanted my own computer after using and abusing my Dad's computers up until now. I saw an advert for Morgan Computers where they were selling Amstrad PPC512DD portable computers with a free external monitor. I fancied the idea of having a laptop as a rich guy on my course had one. So i went along and bought it...

If you are not familiar with the PPC512 then it was an unusual portable computer. It had a full-size proper keyboard (so was fairly big) though it had a small black & white (and non-backlit) LCD screen. This was rather hard to see anything on though so i tended to use the Sinclair black & white monitor instead (until it overheated which was usually by the time the PPC had booted). It had twin 3.5" floppy disc drives and not a great deal else. It was not what you would call a laptop though to be fair it was not a heavy computer. It ran reasonably well, with an NEC V30 chip (a clone of the 8086) and 512K of RAM.

I can't remember a great deal about the PPC to be honest because i sold it within a couple of months. I only lost about 20 quid on it, selling it to a fellow student, he didn't come back to me for a refund so i assume he got some good use out of it! I wanted a proper laptop and that is where i thought i was going next...

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