With regret, Sir Alan, you’re fired!

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

I’ve written columns in the past bemoaning the slow death of the British PC industry. Now the ravens really are fleeing the Tower, with the news that Alan Sugar (or Suralan to The Apprentice generation) has resigned as chairman of Amstrad, after selling out to Sky last year.

To be fair, Sugar hasn’t really been a prominent figure in the PC industry for well over a decade. Issue 1 of PC Pro from November 1994 gave his Amstrad PC9486 a measly two stars, which I’m sure historians will mark as the beginning of the end for the company as a force in British computing.

Yet, I’ve still got a soft spot for the grouchy old sod, mainly because of the brilliant Amstrad NC200 laptop that saw me through university. This was the Eee PC of its day – ultraportable, easy-to-use, and far cheaper than any Windows laptop of its era. It even came with a soft faux-leather wallet, which was the clincher for me.

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