Amstrad PCW

Amstrad PCW were a range of computers produced by British company Amstrad in the 1980s and 1990s. They were licenced for sale in Europe by Schneider of Germany, where they went by the name "Joyce" (an early nickname of the computer derived from the name of Alan Sugar's PA, Joyce Caley). It is estimated that over 8 million PCWs were sold by the time the line was retired.

Unlike Amstrad's other range of computers, the Amstrad CPC, the PCW was aimed at the business and home office market. The PCW was marketted as a no-nonsense "all-in-one" word processing system and was incredibly good value as the standard package included a monitor, suitable office software, a printer, a BASIC interpreter and the CP/M operating system.

Although not sold as a gaming device, the bundled CP/M system gave the PCW access to a wide range of text adventures; including those by Infocom, which were sold in the UK on 3" disks suitable for the PCW, CPC and (with additional software) the ZX Spectrum +3.

Later PCW systems swapped out the 3" disks with more industry standard 3.5" ones. The final system released in the range was the PcW16 which, despite its name, was largely incompatible with the previous PCW machines.