The Amstrad NC100 - portable perfection?

A new year has arrived and this being the first new post of the year, I thought I'd begin with a retro-tech post, forward looking and all that malarky. As some of you may have noticed, I have a bit of an interest in old tech. More specifically, the tech of the early 1980's to early noughties. This encompasses the period of first generation consumer computing tech hitting the market to the final generation before the homogeneity of today's smartphone culture, where two operating systems and an almost identical form factor have combined to remove almost any individuality from the market. Indeed, where there are modern day unique devices: The Astrohaus Freewrite/Traveller, the Gemini handheld and even the open-source Pandora-derived Pyro, these tend to be small scale production models with prices commensurate to their niche appeal.

In part, this interest stems from growing up looking at such devices and thinking they were the dog's danglies (and some actually were for their time). It's also in part in seeing how much technology has developed and whether or not the original device designers got it right at the time but no-one noticed. There is also the self imposed challenge of seeing if tech discarded as obsolete fifteen, twenty or even twenty five plus years ago can still cut it today. Obviously, I am not going to try and run Pocket Internet Explorer from a 1998 vintage Windows CE palmtop or lug around an Amstrad PPC-512 portable from 1988. That would just be silly. No, it's more a case of if the device and software can still be used today, can they be used in a genuinely productive manner.

As such, it's time to talk about the oldest piece of retro-tech (outside of games consoles) that I own: The Amstrad NC100. Launched for the princely sum of £199.95 in 1992 (that's about £406 in today's money), the NC100 is an A4-sized slab of plastic with a qwerty keyboard, mono-LCD screen and 64kb of RAM. Powered by the ubiquitous Zilog Z80 processor racing at 4Mhz, you could expand the memory via PCMCIA cards of up to 1Mb (wooooo!!!) capacity. Four AA batteries offered a twenty hour lifespan, you have an RS-232 serial port for PC connectivity and a parallel port for printers. Primary applications include a word processor, calculator, diary and organiser. It even has BASIC for any programming needs and a terminal emulator/XMODEM ability for file transfers - indeed, a reviewer at the time of launch typed her review on the machine and filed back to the office via a 300-baud modem link. Take that you youngsters with your high speed fibre :-). In short, this was a device I really wanted when I was a teenager and I finally have my hands on one now, including it's original packaging which has not handled the passage of time too well.

In not too bad a condition considering the age.

Back when packaging was practical and informative.

First things first, the look. It follows the design of the Cambridge Z88, another device that found heavy use in educational and journalistic circles due to its ease of use and portability. It's a slab of black plastic, yes, but livened up by brightly coloured function keys that allowed shortcut commands for the built-in software. Why? To make it easy to use. That was the design brief from Mr Sugar himself (to the point where he wrote the introduction to the manual - so the story goes). And by and large, they did it. True, a younger user would struggle (where's the screen to tap away on?), but within ten minutes of switching the NC100 on, I'd figured out pretty much every menu and that was just by trial and error.

Everything that came in the box.

Build quality is fairly good. There is a bit of creaking if you really try and bend it but otherwise, it's a solid machine. Less hollow sounding than the Alphasmart 3000 I am typing this one and, dare I say it, a bit more durable. The manual is very detailed and handy for perusal but I get the feeling that new owners of the machine were meant to switch it on and get on with it.

The main menu - simplistic and clean

Although basic, the screen does its job well

The screen is basic, very basic, with 80 characters per row and 8 rows visible on-screen. it's not going to win any beauty contests and the text is rather small, but it does the job, unless it's dark. No back-lighting here but that helps with the battery live immensely. The follow up NC200 offered a half-clam-shell design with a built-in 3.5 inch floppy drive and a bigger, back-lit screen. You also got a spreadsheet, database and some games. The downside here was the move to C-cell batteries and the inability for the device to access the floppy drive if the batteries were even slightly below a full charge.

Organiser applications.

Calculator.

What the NC100 does benefit from is the keyboard. It clacks reassuringly like a typewriter, it's not overly loud but the sound is pleasing and not overly plasticky like most modern keyboards. The keys have a good amount of travel and spring back with just the right amount of tension. Honestly, this is the best non-desktop keyboard I have ever experienced for its size. Sitting down and bashing out a couple of hundred words was effortless and rather enjoyable and the only fault I can mention with the design is the slightly iffy angle of the screen which made viewing it a little bit of a chore. Other than that, the NC100 is superbly designed.

This brings me to the major issue with using it today. Whatever I type on the machine is held in battery backed up RAM. Finding 1Mb or smaller PCMCIA cards has proved a tad difficult and where I have found one, the prices being asked are eye-watering. There is the option of a serial cable so that will probably be my preferred method of transfer, but that may take some playing about with terminal programs and the like. Sadly, the NC100 pre-dates plug and play (even the hated Windows 95 idea of P&P) and lacks the easy transfer option of the Alphasmart. If only there were a way of combining the keyboard of the NC100 with the slightly more modern tech of the Alphasmart...

In a way, it's a shame. the concept is sound, the tech is good enough and the implementation excellent for its time. Yet, because of its age, it's not easy to use today. However, there are workarounds and with a bit of care and effort, I can see the NC100 lasting a good few years yet. What would be really good is if instead of going down the big-business data collection route of Google with their Chromebooks, or the bloated and relatively poorly performing budget Windows laptops or even the tablet/keyboard hybrids that are neither fish nor fowl, someone put together a low cost typing device that follows the mould of the NC100/Alphasmart/Z88? Think about it, a decent low power screen (doesn't have to be colour - in fact it shouldn't be to preserve battery life), in an A4 format with an ARM chip, a couple of GB of storage and the ability to run off either removable lithium-ion batteries or AA's. Using a basic operating system with applications saving in modern file formats, I think there could be a market for this device. Less fragile and cheaper than laptops, a better typing experience than tablets, what's not to like?

It won't happen, not least when you have the likes of the Astrohaus Traveller which offers something similar but in a clamshell format and a price that's just scary ($238 when the Indiegogo campaign launched, $349 (£270-ish) now - though comparing to the inflation adjusted price of the NC100, that's not too bad). It also doesn't help that if such a mythical machine were available, it would need to retail for $150 or less, and that would have to make it a relatively high volume, low margin product and I don't think the volume would be there, not compared to Chromebooks and tablets. Of course, it would be a niche product and by its very nature, lack the "perceived" value competitors offer.
As for me, I'll keep using  the Alphasmart and, when I have the cabling, the NC100. They are specifically focused machines with cracking battery lives and decent (in the case of the NC100, brilliant) keyboards. For simple text entry, nothing comes close. Sometimes, it's true, they just don't make them like they used to.