The combination of low cost, integrated design, good manufacturing quality and some impressive features like CP/M and an 80-column display mode (which was lacking in the competition) proved to be a success both with home users and small businesses, and Amstrad went on to sell millions of CPCs.
However, because of its use of the Z80, which was also used in the Sinclair models, many of the games found on the CPC were direct ports of the Spectrum versions. As a result, they failed to take advantage of the CPC's extra capabilities, leaving users and reviewers with a bad taste in their mouth, a situated that lasted for the entire life of the machines.
The CPC's operating system was called [[AMSDOS]] (Amstrad's Disk Operating System) and was included on a ROM chip of 48KB. Also in ROM there was the Locomotive BASIC interpreter which made the CPC very fast in BASIC operations, compared to other contemporary machines.
In all, there were three basic models, the CPC [[464]], [[664]] and [[6128]], plus two more [[Plus|advanced]] models, the CPC464+ and the 6128+. A final iteration was the [[Plus|GX4000]] games machine based on the CPC+ computers.