Company information

A short history of Amstrad plc and some financial data will appear here when I get round to chopping my email folder into bite sized chunks.

Amstrad = ?

One of the most often asked questions about Amstrad is what the name "Amstrad" means. I have to admit that when I first joined I'd heard of "Amstrad" but thought it was probably a Dutch company or something like that. I was wrong. It always was and probably always will be very definitely British because it was formed in the East End of London by a certain Alan Michael Sugar who, rumour has it, started selling car radios out of the back of a van. The first company he formed was called Alan Michael Sugar Trading Limited and through various revisions this finally became Amstrad.

Very early history

I only joined in 1984 at about the time Amstrad was producing their first home computer (CPC464) so I wouldn't try to give any information about the companies history prior to that. Anyway, there's no need for me to because there is an excellent book called "The Amstrad Story" written by a David Thomas that covers that (and the early computer development). Sad to say, David Thomas was an FT journalist who was killed in the Gulf War (just after it ended!) when the jeep he was travelling in was caught in an oil well fire.

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