The CPC launched in 1984, just before the home computer crash. It was a relatively expensive and unproven machine, competing in a market that was glutted with unsold stock at knock-down prices. With the required monitor, the CPC 464 cost £300. That Christmas, you could have had a Spectrum 48k Plus for £140 or an Acorn Electron for £100, with a free tape recorder and a bundle of games. Your mates probably had Specrums, so you could copy all their games for the price of a blank cassette. The CPC wasn't that much cheaper than the BBC Model B, which was the respectable middle-class home computer at the time.

The Speccy was the right computer for the times. It arrived very early on in the home computer boom and was very keenly priced, so it maintained good network effects throughout its lifespan. The machine was cheap, the peripherals were cheap and there were loads of games. Sir Clive didn't fragment the platform by introducing incompatible new models, he just kept cutting the price. The Speccy remained popular into the tail end of the 1980s, almost entirely because of the huge back catalogue of games. We loved it in part because it was a bit crap and because Sir Clive was such a hopeless businessman - the British have a terrible soft spot for underdogs.

The CPC didn't sell well as a home computer, but it was quite attractive as a small-business machine - the monochrome display was cheap and reasonably crisp, the 3" floppy drive was far cheaper than 3.5" drives and it would run CP/M. Lord Sugar responded very shrewdly with the PCW series, which was tailored for business and sold far better than the CPC. Marketing the PCW as a word processor rather than a computer and bundling it with a printer was a minor stroke of genius, with the brilliant slogan "more than a word processor for less than most typewriters".

Amstrad had the last laugh by buying out the rights to the Spectrum, but the sheer quantity of Speccies that Amstrad sold is a testament to the platform.