loading . . . Old tech for typing: using 1992’s Amstrad NC100 Notepad in 2025 In the early 1990s, I got to play with a new Amstrad device: the NC100 “notepad computer”. At the time, Amstrad was **the** name in British computer manufacturing. Notably it had shifted more than a million of its PCW series of word processors and while at this point it was pushing its line of IBM-compatible PCs, it hadn’t forgotten the success it had had with word processing kit.
Amstrad’s NC100: portable productivity
Enter the NC100, a mobile machine sporting a full size keyboard and a 480×60-pixel LCD used to render 80×8 characters. Pitched as a personal productivity tool, it shipped with on-board diary, calculator, address book, world time and spreadsheet applications as well as word processing software. Heck, it even included BBC Basic, in case you wanted to write your own programs on your daily commute.
It was powered by four AA batteries, with a lithium coin cell for memory back-up. It had a 4MHz Z80 CPU and 64KB of Ram.
Why my interest? I’d been excited by portable computing ever since reading about the Epson HX-20 in the pages of _Personal Computer World_ back in 1982. The HX-20 was followed by the bigger screen Tandy Model 100, but neither was in my reach of my pocket at the time. In the later 1980s, Sir Clive Sinclair released the Cambridge Z88 — his first computing product after selling Sinclair Research to Amstrad. The NC100 feels like Sir Alan Sugar’s acknowledgement that Clive was onto something, and that the success of the PCW could be replicated in a new, mobile market. Sinclair had a passion for portable computing that went back to the 1970s. The ZX80 would have been portable if he could have added that functionality and kept the price low, but in the end price considerations trumped portability — as was not the case with the NewBrain, a portable micro that once could have been released under the Sinclair brand.
The NC100’s main menu
To me, the NC100 was crudely designed and made — especially compared to the Z88 — but the software was good, and I was sad to hand it back after a week or two. I’ve always remembered it fondly and Having wallowed in some tech nostalgia with the Psion Series 3a, I wondered about the availability of NC100s these days.
Here’s the thing about the Psion: I love the design but the keyboard isn’t really up to authoring standards. It’s certainly usable but the keys are tiny and even after a couple of months, my typing (never great at the best of times) was more error prone than I’d like. So I spaffed 70 quid on the rather larger NC100 to give it another try.
The Amstrad’s keyboard is a lot less clacky than I remember. It’s nice to use mechanical keys rather than the Z88’s membrane. The unit feels weightier and more solid than memory recalled too. It still requires some determination with each keystroke. Being accustomed to modern light-touch laptop keyboards, having to press harder was a surprise, but I quickly got used to it. And the full size keys are much easier to hammer than the Psion’s little ones are.
Those 27600 LCD pixels in all their 80×8-character glory
The NC100’s LCD screen is inferior and isn’t backlit either. The cursor submarines a lot. You really need good overhead lighting to use it. The NC100 sports a pair of fold-down legs which give the keyboard a nice angle, but do little to make the screen more readable. Adjust the contrast can help — there’s a wheel on the side for this, but I still found myself leaning over to check what I’d typed. It helps that the font is monospaced, so while it doesn’t look as good as proportionally spaced text on the greyscale-supporting Psion, reading at a glance works better. And eight lines may not be much by today’s standards, but you can see a reasonable amount of text at a time.
Incidentally, I started out using the NC100 on a desk. When I later placed on my lap – and so was looking down on it rather than across at it — the screen was better oriented. It was clearly designed as a true ‘lap-top’ machine.
The screen contrast wheel and, below, one of the lift-it-on-up legs
I mentioned before that memory is limited. There’s a maximum of 64KB (double the Z88’s), but 15KB of that is used by the system, so you might not be banging your answer to _War and Peace_ on it unless you can find a 1MB PCMCIA SRAM card. PCMCIA cards of any kind are not common, and the SRAM ones (the memory is preserved with slot-in coin cells) are even more rare. You can’t use Flash, apparently, so my initial plan of hacking together PCMCIA and CompactFlash adaptors with an old, partitioned SD card doesn’t look likely to work.
It has a weird memory organisation too. 38KB of the 64KB is the main memory area and it’s here that documents are edited. But they’re stored in 11KB of ‘upper’ RAM, and copied into main when opened for editing. But small docs can be stored in main too, and all will be if the upper zone becomes full.
I suppose the idea is that docs in upper can be kept safe from Basic while leaving the interpreter room for useful programs. Indeed, upper is where Basic programs are saved and later loaded from, with the main bank used as program, string and stack space.
Incidentally, there’s a CP/M clone that will run on the NC100 which I would like to try, but that will have to wait until I track down a PCMCIA SRAM card for sensible money.
For casual work, however, the NC100’s base memory may be sufficient. It helps that the machine has a d-sub RS232 port on the back so I can hook it up to my Macs and Raspberry Pis when the storage space begins to run out. I can see myself using it as a distraction-free writing machine to bash out basic text which I can then transfer across for polishing and publishing. Yes, as a 1992 machine, there’s no Internet support here.
Connect via serial (RS-232) or parallel (you know, for printers)
Serial works fine. The speed is limited to 9600bps, but that’s OK, and the USB-to-serial cable I bought for use with the Psion can transfer the data across. The gender changer bundled with the cable proved useful, as did the null modem converter I bought just in case. The NC100 assumes RX and TX are swapped, which the Psion doesn’t. The NC100 was designed with file transfer in mind, so sending a file is just a handful of keypresses away.
On the receiving end, I used _minicom_ and set it waiting to receive an xmodem transfer. Across comes the file, which is saved to disk. You can set the NC100 to send word docs in formatting-free Ascii or formatted for _Protext_ , an ancient PC word processor. Fortunately, I discovered the source code for a 1996 C program which converts _Protext_ to RTF (Rich Text Format). Not so much use on Linux, that, but macOS’ bundled _TextEdit_ speaks it. I had to tweak the C code to get it to build on Linux and on macOS, and using a real doc I found a few format codes missing from the original code, but upgraded it works on modern machines to convert _Protext_ files to rich text. And I can always type Markdown and not worry about file formats.
You can find my modification of original writer Maksim Lin’s 1996 source in my GitHub repo.
Using _minicom_ on macOS this way requires some extra steps first. Use Homebrew to install _minicom_ , but also install _lrzsz_. The latter adds the transfer helpers _minicom_ relies on. After installation, run `ln -s /opt/homebrew/bin/lrx /opt/homebrew/bin/rx` then `ln -s /opt/homebrew/bin/lsx /opt/homebrew/bin/sx`.
Plug the NC100 into your Mac, run `ls /dev/cu*` to get the serial adaptor’s device path and use it to launch _minicom_ with `minicom -D {device path} -b 9600`.
Now hit **option** –**r** , select **xmodem** from the menu, enter a filename and initiate a transfer on the NC100: from the main menu hit **Function** –**L** to select the file to transfer, then **Secret/Menu** , **T** and **X**. There’s a pregnant pause while the two machines handshake and then the actual data exchange occurs quite quickly. It’s quite old school watching a numeric count of received blocks!
Get your Notepad docs courtesy of xmodem
The NC100 also incorporates a serial comms program so I can connect it to my headless homelab and log in directly rather than over the network. The only snag: it can’t parse ANSI codes, so the output isn’t as clear as it could be. I’ve tried configuring the host _agetty_ serial terminal manager to use different, hopefully ANSI-free terminal types, but still no joy.
It ought to go without saying that this post was written on my NC100, but my Psion posts were only partly written on the device. The NC100 is, it turns out, a usable portable electronic typewriter. It was indeed used for this post — it will be used again for others.
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### _Related_ https://blog.smittytone.net/2025/02/03/old-tech-for-typing-using-1992s-amstrad-nc100-notepad-in-2025/
