Surprised that the PC1512 is 1986 vintage! My mum and dad bought a PC1512 HD20 from K Mart in 1991 for around 1400 Australian dollars. You couldn''t buy a decent computer (386, 486) for under $2000 at the time so this was it. But it carried my mum through university from 1992 to 1995, using the Ability software package, which combined word processor, spreadsheet, database and modem communication software. I learned some MS-DOS (and so did my mum!) using the included tutorial disk. The computer eventually broke down in 1999 - the hard drive had failed but a replacement HDD was hard to justify because we didn''t really need the computer, and I thought a replacement would be hard to find and/or expensive. It wasn''t much but I have indispensable (to this day!) knowledge and a foundation in computers because of this thing.

My father bought the Amstrad PC1512 in 1988, just a year before I was born. 22 years later and the computer still works perfectly without any blemishes. I grew so fond with it that I kept and maintained it over all these years$ today I not only regularly play old classics like Digger (Play it over at http://digger.org!), Castle Adventure, Q-Bert and others but I also have a small library of games and programs I made in GW-Basic for it. Some of the programs I even released online on my website. I hope my precious old jewel survives for decades to come!

My father bougt himself an used Amstrad PC1512 in 1993. Although I never really understood why he did that (I also shared a brand new 486 with him), this machine was one of the most interesting and amazing computers I have ever seen. We replaced the B-floppy by a 30 MB NEC hard disk which looked quite odd (black panel) but worked perfectly.
Though it was far away from being a high-end pc, its strange features made me love it. First, the clock and calendar was powered by 4 AA-type batteries being placed on top of the case and only covered by the monitor placed above. The loudspeaker was not simply a beeper, it war REALLY loud but could be reduced by a volume potentiometer placed beside it. On the backside of the Keyboard there was a 9-pin joystick connector to support a joystick built for Commodore and Atari systems. It was no real pc-type gameport (which used a 15-pin connector) but only offered the possibility to use a joytick instead of the cursor-keys that were disabled when a joytick was connected. Anyway, it was fun to use the joystick instead of the cousor-keys, also Commodore-type joysticks were cheaper and did not need to be calibrated.
The case itself offered a wide empty space, I never found what this was for.
I loved this machine but sadly my father didn''t. Only about one year later he replaced it by a used 386 pc.