A tale of Ghosts'n Goblins'n Crocodiles

When he was a kid, Sébastien Harelle was given a computer. It was Christmas 1988 and "ordinateurs" were finally starting to find their ways inside French homes. It was not Sébastien's first contact with such a machine. As early as 1985, following Laurent Fabius's "Computers for Everybody" plan[1], all elementary schools introduced children to Logo programming via star-connected[2] Thomson MO5s. This computer did not have network capability but it was full-fledged with a monitor and a floppy disc unit integrated in the keyboard. Turning it on brought up a blue background and yellow text home-screen displaying "BASIC 1.0 Ready" and a prompt. Soon he was spending entire evenings at his desk. Besides programming, there was an immense catalog of games available. After inserting a floppy disk and typing "RUN DISC"[3], he was welcomed to the reals of Gryzor, Barbarian, and Renegade. Sébastien did not know it at the time but like many other French kids he would end up developing an ever-lasting appreciation for that machine, the Amstrad CPC.

If you are not from France or the UK and if you were not born in the late 70s, chances are you have no idea what an Amstrad CPC is. To put it in one sentence, Amstrad took the 8-bit home computer market by storm in the mid-80s thanks to great advertising and low prices. It is Christmas 1985 and you want to buy your kids a computer. On one side, you have a C64 with 64KiB RAM for $149. It can display 16 colors and also has features you don't understand like hardware sprites and soft-scrolling. You will also have to buy a floppy drive ($272) and a TV ($293). On the other side, you have an Amstrad CPC 464 with similar specs except it comes with a screen, has a higher resolution and only costs $472[4][5][6]. Which one do you buy? My concept was simple: Mum and Dad don’t want little Johnny taking over the TV set, so our computer should come with its own monitor, have a full-sized keyboard and a built-in cassette mechanism for loading software and hit a target price of £199. This way, little Johnny could have it in his bedroom, freeing up the family TV. - Alan Sugar (Amstrad founder)[7]

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