This was the week when two of the leading home computer manufacturers of the day unveiled new machines for the Christmas season. Amstrad, whose angular all-in (CPU, monitor and tape/disk drive) CPC systems had been hoovering up a fair percentage of the 'we want the best value' shoppers for some five years, concluded that their dated machines needed nothing more radical than a makeover, as opposed to a technological facelift.

The new CPC Plus range consisted of the 464 (64k memory, tape deck and mono monitor for £229, or £329 with colour monitor) and the 6128 (128k memory, 3" disk drive and mono monitor for £329, or £429 with colour monitor). Their new visage was remarkably similar to the Amiga A500, borrowing the same swoopy beige casing, and even the Amstrad logo stamped above the keyboard became a sloping, capitalised font.

The Plus range still ran the same old shoddy 8bit software endemic to the previous CPC machines, which was little better than Spectrum quality: a beige casing did not an Amiga alternative make, and anyone with £400 to spend on a computer would have needed a jolly good reason to throw it Amstrad's way when the Amiga was £399. A few did, but the management of Commodore must have slept easy in their beds after seeing the CPC Plus specs...

Especially when they had their own little surprise to unleash. Although the Amiga was sweeping up just about all the aspirational purchases, at the low end of the market their offering was under threat. The Commodore 64 had first seen the light of day in 1983 and was now very long in the tooth. It had been a great machine by the standards of the early '80s, and Commodore were reluctant to kill it off as it acted as an ideal introduction to the brand for those unable or unwilling to pay Amiga money. It had a big problem though.

The C2N cassette deck had been designed in a gentler age (for the VIC 20, in fact), before the existence of 'turbo' loaders, and it couldn't cope with them unless the cassette head was aligned absolutely spot on. Thousands of Commodore 64s were sold every year and a high proportion were returned with the dreaded 'won't load games' fault. With Sega's Master System and Nintendo's NES now offering low-cost, pain-free gaming, something had to be done. Commodore's solution, the £99 GS, attempted to solve the 'won't load' problem and see off the Japanese console invasion.

The GS was a Commodore 64 but without the cassette port or keyboard. Instead, it utilised the cartridge slot at the back of the machine which had lain dormant for some five years. Ocean, System 3 and one or two other publishers bravely released a few £14.99 cartridges but it all came to nothing. With the ordinary C64 offering everything the GS had, and more, for around the same price, there was no reason for anyone to buy Commodore's ugly console. With hindsight, the only way it could have worked would have been at a sub-£50 pricepoint, which eventually happened, but only when it was too late and stores had marked the GS with the dreaded 'reduced to clear' tickets.