Amstrad sold to BSkyB

Sir Alan Sugar's Amstrad has been bought by BSkyB for £125m; causing Amstrad's share price to leap 20% to 145p.

Of course, Amstrad is now probably better known to everyone in the UK because of the antics of Sugar on the Apprentice. Amstrad of late made most (75%) of its revenues from set top boxes for BSkyB - hence the purchase clearly makes sense.

But my "fondest" remembrances of the company were back in the 1980s when Amstrad was the first really affordable home computer. We bought one for word processing. Indeed my wife persuaded her employer to utilise them across all branches of their travel agency (do you remember when every town had half a dozen travel agents? The last one in Farnham closed last week)

Those were the Amstrad heydays. More recently we had disasters like the e-mailer and Sugar's media stardom.

1980s...those were the days.