News that Alan Sugar has sold Amstrad to BSkyB will trigger a frisson of nostalgia among older British computer users. The company was never technically innovative - in fact, it seemed to have a policy of using technology that was slightly behind the curve, perhaps because it was cheaper to do so. But it produced two designs that were seminal for UK computing.

One was the PC 1512, the first PC cheap enough to get mass sales among UK home users. By PC, of course, I mean IBM-compatible. I bought a PC 1512 with 640Kbyte of Ram, and a luxurious 10Mbyte hard disk, plus an Epson dot-matrix printer for less than £1000, which was a very good deal for the time.

Like most IBM-compatibles of those days, it was not quite pukka. The monitor drew its power from the computer, so that you could not simply swap in a new one, and the keyboard used a non-standard connector. But it ran IBM-compatible software, which is what counted.

The 1512 was for techies, but the Amstrad PCW 8256 wordprocessor got the technophobes using computers. It was clunky, and hard to use, but it cost little more than an electric typewriter and was a hundred times better than one.

It fulfilled a prediction that I had seen some years earlier, in the first article I read describing a word processor. For a journalist like myself, the idea sounded wonderful almost beyond belief. Even more incredible was the forecast that such a device would be available within ten years for around £300. The PCW 8256 cost £300 complete (as I recall) with printer,

These were inspired bundles rather than advanced technology and Amstrad never managed to repeat their success, despite a succession of eccentric forays into the market. About ten years ago it stopped stopped trying, and moved to contract manufacture of devices such as set-top boxes.