Amstrad PCW 512K Loft Box Opening in Stroud

Arthur the Red found a box languishing in the loft of the house he’d moved into and asked if I’d like it. I knew roughly what was inside (something I’d used at school), but the box had been sitting in my backlog for far too long. So I took it to Stroud and opened it in The Cave with Neil from RMC, and it turned out to be a 512K Amstrad PCW word processor plus a pile of oddities I genuinely wasn’t expecting. This video was supported by PCBWay.

What was in the box?

Before the computer itself, there was a lot of packing material and a lot of extras:

A Panasonic VHS-C cassette and a printer cable.
A Sony HF90 audio cassette (definitely not PCW software).
A reel-to-reel tape of Judy Garland’s You’ll Never Walk Alone, which I’d love to know is still playable.
The PCW Toolkit (Moonstone Computing edition) on 3-inch disc, and Program Your PCW by Ian Sinclair (no relation).
A whole box of CF2 3-inch discs, including LocoSpell, LocoScript, BASIC adventures, a Dixons-branded utilities disc and several with no label.
A couple of EMI guides to tape recording and tape editing, which made me very grateful I don’t have to splice tape to edit my videos.

Judy Garland You'll Never Walk Alone reel-to-reel tape found in a loft box with an Amstrad PCW — A Judy Garland reel-to-reel was not what I expected to find

The 3-inch CF2 discs are the same format used in the CPC 6128, the Spectrum +3 and the Tatung Einstein, and they’re getting harder to find, so a full box is a real bonus. Back in the 90s I worked in a disc duplication factory, and we never did 3-inch discs: the media was so expensive and controlled by so few companies that it didn’t make sense to stock it. That’s why so many 3-inch discs carry retail labels.

PCW Toolkit Moonstone Computing edition with a 3-inch CF2 disc for the Amstrad PCW — The PCW Toolkit on 3-inch disc

The Amstrad PCW 512K

With Neil’s help (he was conveniently miked up) we lifted out the main unit, with a printer that had effectively been used as packing material. There were discs still in the drives, the screen wasn’t smashed, and underneath it all was the keyboard. Neil had looked through Amstrad Action from 1985, and the closest match was the 8256, which has a single drive. Ours has two drives and 512K of RAM, so it looks like the upgraded model.

Amstrad PCW 512K word processor with twin 3-inch disc drives lifted out of the donated box — Out of the box: twin drives and 512K of RAM

Does it work?

Neil checked the plug first: what looked like the original fuse, cable grip intact, no shorts. Then, after a countdown, power on. The good news: it powers up, and the Caps Lock and Shift Lock lights respond, so the keyboard logic is alive. The bad news: the monitor only showed static, and a 3-inch drive spindle just kept spinning without doing anything. That sounds exactly like a CPC 6128 drive whose belt has turned to jelly, so sorting the drives will be step one. A slap on the side didn’t fix it (it was worth a go).

Amstrad PCW powered on in The Cave showing only static on its monitor — Powered on, but only static so far

So I now have a project for a future video. It’s grubby, a bit pongy and not working yet, but it’s promising. If you know whether a PCW needs a boot disc before it shows anything at all, tell me in the YouTube comments. Big thanks to Arthur the Red for sending it over and to Neil for having me.

More Amstrad on the site: the CPC 464 found in the woods, a Freegle CPC find with tape and disc drive repairs, and another 3-inch drive fix on the Spectrum +3.