I purchased Turbo Pascal 3 for Amstrad CPC 6128 with my pocket money back in 1989(?). That was 1000 FF back then (~275€ today) so quite a big sum for a teenager. My dad took pity on me and funded 50% of it. Best investment ever! Learning Pascal after Locomotive Basic was night and day. And the speeeeeed! I could finally computer 320x200 Mandelbrot set renderings in reasonable amounts of time (few minutes IIRC). I still have the disk & manual somewhere, as well as a couple related books. And for whatever reason Ctrl-K Ctrl-W still haunts my mind. It's really mind boggling that the entire thing (CP/M + IDE + compiler + libraries) fit on one side of a 3" floppy disk (<180 kB).
Doesn’t like it
I was green with envy, when I saw how fast and smooth a C64 scrolled some text (iirc it was some machine code monitor). My Amstrad CPC464 had no text mode and the Z80A CPU was clearly overwhelmed with shifting the whopping 16KiB RAM of the graphics buffer or even just rendering a line of text.
Neutral
I'm pretty sure my Dad got ours because they were being sold off very cheaply after TI pulled out of the home computer market. Like you I ended up learning BASIC on it because as an abandoned system all we had was a few cartridge games, some user-group programs, and typed in BASIC. It worked out pretty well really. (Later we got an Amstrad CPC 6128, which had a much bigger commercial games market.)
Likes it
These listings are fun to explore. As a teenager I got my first 8-bit computer. A lot of my friends had Commodore 64. But a good computer salesman sold me and my dad on the british Amstrad CPC 6128[0]. It had the disk drive and a green monitor. Great computer. Great salesman. They had this newfangled Commodore Amiga but he did not know much about it. It was at the same price but without a monitor so my dad reasoned it would be better as I would then not occupy the living room TV with my computer. I could have jumpstarted my career on 16 bit. I could have been a contender! The Amstrad had a Z80 CPU and ran Locomotive Basic when powered on. But it came with a disk containing CPM Plus 3.0. That was used for "business-like" things such as copying files using "pip to_me from_you". That in turn made me the local über-geek in the computer room in my public school. They had 2 expensive danish made and rather rare Intel 80186 (yes - 80 one 86) based RC Piccoline[1] computers. They in turn each had 4 terminals and 1 dot matrix printer (a typical school setup at the time). A fact which never really dawned upon me at the time what "Concurrent" in CCP/M meant. My geek flex was when the vice principal fetched me during a regular class to help him remove a defamatory text file from a 5,25" floppy disk. He was not able to delete the file himself. I identified the "read-only" attribute was set and such wizardry was rarely seen around those parts. Back in the day when computing was much more h…
Likes it
My memory on the Sinclairs is their keyboards too, horrible, that was the reason I didn't take them serious as a kid (they felt like a Fisher toy), used a ViC20 in a department store to learn coding and then bought an Amstrad CPC - mostly because of the 80 character screen vs. the C64.
Neutral
The Amstrad CPC used the 6845 CRTC and there were lots of other similar warnings about changing the vertical height too much or reducing the sync widths. At the time, people gave all sorts of dire warnings about the monitors being fried. Years later, I have loads of these machines and several monitors, and the only effect I've observed with out-of-spec sync signals is that the monitor can't synchronise properly and you get the rolling screen effect. So, I think all these warnings were theoretical worries rather than based in fact. Interestingly, it seems some people have also tried to inhibit the CRTC vsync signal and create their own with a similar trick to the PET POKE - see 7.3 on page 40: https://shaker.logonsystem.eu/ACCC1.7-EN.pdf (and a comment on page 41 that they have seen damaged chips resulting from this - the PPI is the 8255 bi-directional parallel port driver chip, used on the Amstrad for scanning keyboard, driving the sound chip and miscellaneous such as the VSYNC line).
Likes it
I had the unfashionable but actually pretty cool Amstrad CPC464. I wanted to play games but also program. Hacking games was also much fun: figuring out how to give yourself 100 lives and so on. Many weekends were spent typing lines and lines of code to make simple games. Then we'd save stuff to tape - after we'd spent hours and hours debugging, of course. Elite occupied me for months. Then Forest at World's End, which I mapped out on a bunch of sheets of A4 taped together. When I got older I hacked my joystick port and connected it to a water chaos wheel I'd made out of an old bicycle rim and some other bits, then I wrote a BASIC program to visualise the movement of the wheel, monitoring direction via the hacked joystick port. Oh man. Fun, fun times :-)
Likes it
The Speccy was great, but yes the Amstrad graphics were better. Not because they were anything spectacular, but because the Spectrum suffered from colour clash. In summary, the foreground and background colour (known as the attributes) could only be set at a resolution of an 8x8 block of pixels - so every pixel in each 8x8 block had to share the same colours. This meant for example that as a yellow sprite entered the same 8x8 block as a green thing, then when the code set the colour attributes to yellow (for the sprite) the green thing turned yellow too. The opening seconds of this video [1] show it pretty clearly. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PI6GwKVAeY Disclaimer (which I feel appropriate given the old school playground wars about which was the best platform): I had a CPC464 which I loved and still run emulated, but also often went round to mate's houses for Speccy gaming too.