By 1992, once fast-growing Amstrad was struggling. Its reputation as a PC maker
had been undermined by a batch of dodgy Seagate disk drives at the same time
that bigger-name vendors were engaged in a price war, squeezing Amstrad out of
the market.
The NC 100, NC 150 and NC 200 were three products that its founder Alan Sugar was hoping would help revive the company's fortunes.
Cutting edge, they were not. Both were based on old eight-bit Zilog Z80
microprocessors. Curiously, both machines came with a BBC Basic interpreter on
which users could develop their own applications.
The NC 100 was a £199 notebook computer the size of a piece of A4 paper, with a full size keyboard and a "letterbox" screen at the top, offering 80 columns by 8 lines.
It had an RS232 serial port and a Centronics parallel port for printer and communications. Built-in were 64 kilobytes of memory, expandable to 1 megabyte with the addition of an add-on memory card.
"If you can't use this new computer in five minutes, you'll get your money
back," boasted the company in its launch advertising. For ease of use, it had
four colour-coded keys giving instant access to a number of built-in
applications, including a word processor, calculator, diary and address book.
At a time when an entry-level lap-top computer cost more than £2,000 and the
sub-notebook had not been invented, the NC100 and NC200 offered a good value
alternative for those with basic computing needs, such as word processing on the move.
All the NC computers were made in Japan by Nakajima. The company also sold its own version of the NC-100, called ES-210.
Thanks to Graeme Burton for information about NC series computers.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
This website really is ace. Recently came to own one of these machines. A fascinating piece of history. Quite practical as a distraction free writing machine.
One query: Does anyone know which printers it is compatible with?
Saturday 15th January 2022
Karl Cross (United Kingdom)
I purchased an NC100 in 1992 for $A399 to type menus for my restaurant. I later purchased a 512K memory card for $189! The Australian flyer proudly boasts "In 10 seconds flat, anyone can use it" and was promoted as the "Amstrad Notepad".
Sunday 13rd March 2016
David Simkin (Australia)
I purchased an NC 100 around 1994 for 200,- DM (approx. 100,- EUR) in a local electronic store. It served me for more than two years in my studies where I used it to type the lectures directly into the system. With all my classmates writing by hand this was really exotic back those days. I used kind of a "simplified" LaTeX notation which I converted into "real" LaTeX on my computer at home using some scripts in a Linux environment. this setup allowed me to type even complex mathematical formulas almost error-free in realtime!
I still have the device and while not using it any more today, I will keep it - it was my first "Laptop"...
Saturday 1st November 2008
Dirk Hillbrecht (Germany)
NAME
NC 100
MANUFACTURER
Amstrad
TYPE
Portable
ORIGIN
United Kingdom
YEAR
August 1992
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
BBC Basic
KEYBOARD
Full-stroke 64 keys
CPU
Z80
CO-PROCESSOR
NEC custom chip (various I/O and memory management)
RAM
64 KB
ROM
Unknown
TEXT MODES
80 char x 8 lines
GRAPHIC MODES
480 x 64 pixels
COLORS
bluish grey LCD
SOUND
Beeper
SIZE / WEIGHT
29,5(W) x 21(D) x 2,8(H) cm. / 1 Kg
I/O PORTS
Parallel Centronics, Serial RS-232
BUILT IN MEDIA
1 MB PCMCIA slot
OS
BBC BASIC, word processor, diary, calculator, address book, serial terminal in ROM
