This was Amstrad's first foray into the IBM PC compatible market. They managed to fit a machine capable of running MS-DOS 3.2 and Digital Research's GEM desktop into a box costing £399 when it was released in 1986 - half the price of the then current market leaders. Such cost reductions were gained by such things as making the machine's casing extremely thin compared to the others (ie no metal), only having one power supply (in the monitor, which fed the required voltages to the system box) and not needing a special CMOS battery since that was fed from 4 AA batteries that sat in a pod in the top of the system box that was cunningly hidden by putting it under the monitor....

This particular machine has been expanded by adding a hard drive and a memory card the size of Texas - I thought Apple memory expansions were big till I saw this beast. Everything is in exceptional condition and spotlessly clean; unfortunately I'm getting a data error on the GEM startup disk so all I can do is boot DOS for now. Good to hear that hard drive clunking away though :) Click on the thumbs.....