A Spoonful

I don't think it's a big secret that I'm not the greatest fan of Alan Sugar. I respect the guy for the whole rags to riches thing, but his book "The Way I See It" really should have that picture of Grandpa Simpson yelling at a cloud on the front cover, the man really is running on fumes these days. Growing up, as I did, in the 80s, among 80s technology, I had a bit of a bee in my bonnet over his company Amstrad and the products they sold. I once heard computing in Britain in the 80s summarised beautifully in one sentence:

Sinclair was good and cheap, Amstrad was cheap and crap, until Amstrad bought Sinclair, then everything was crap except for Commodore, which wasn't cheap.

Amstrad tech was basically comedy. Look at the 3" floppy disk. The farcical architecture of the PC1512. The Spectrum +2A. The Mega-PC. I could go on.

But I'm going to concede on one thing, which was ridiculed at the time (including by myself) but I now realise was basically a genius idea, about two decades ahead of its time. I'm talking about the eMailer.

In concept, the eMailer, released around 2000, was nothing bad. There were several models, and I'm pretty sure about 90% of all the units sold now live in the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, they have dozens of the things. The way it worked is you plugged it into a normal house phone line - remember, home internet connections were the exception rather than the rule in the late 90s - and hey presto, you could send and receive emails without needing a bulky, expensive PC in the house.

But it was a walled garden. It had no connection settings, it just dialed Amstrad's dial-up internet service provider using a premium rate number in order to get your email. Amstrad's business model was to sell the unit at a loss and then make the profit on the usage, much like HP do with printer ink. Problem is that the only people who used email at the time were people like me, cynical nerds and techies, and we were all pretty shocked at the cheek of Amstrad expecting you to keep paying to get your email using a device you'd already paid for. To be fair, Amstrad did eventually break even, but not until years later.

But let's fast forward just a few short decades to the present ... all consumer tech is a walled garden! People buy mobile phones locked to phone networks. Devices that literally don't work unless you sign up to a service and keep them online all the time. Heck, most home automation kit these days relies on the manufacturer's server being available all the time, despite the high probability of the manufacturer going bust, or being bought by a bigger company that can't be bothered to keep the server on. So-called 'smart' televisions are cheaper than normal TVs because you're expected to plug them into the internet, where the manufacturer can sell your life history to any advertiser that pays them. Modern tech users bloody love being held to ransom by tech firms and the Amstrad eMailer would slay in the current consumer tech market.

Tell you what's also pretty popular these days: reboots and sequels, particularly of stuff with nostalgia value. I wouldn't be surprised to see the new 2026 model Amstrad eMailer, probably with added Slack or WhatsApp functionality, on Amazon any day now, at the bargain retail price of just one kidney.