It was terrific. I used my Amstrad CPC to dial up to bulletin boards: Preston ROS, Aspects BBS, Supe's Motel. Aspects was known to be one of the best in the UK,

It was terrific. I used my Amstrad CPC to dial up to bulletin boards: Preston ROS, Aspects BBS, Supe's Motel. Aspects was known to be one of the best in the UK, and it was consequently the devil's own work not to get the engaged tone. Early on, connection speed was 300/300 or 1200/75. Later I ended up writing my own terminal program, because I picked up a 2400 baud +compression modem from somewhere, and none of the existing software was fast enough to do the resulting speed of 4800 baud without dropping characters. To get the speed it had to talk directly to the UART in the serial interface, and then write the bitmaps directly to screen: no firmware calls anywhere, they were too slow. Heady days. FWIW I don't think any of the 8-bit Amstrads came with a built-in serial port. But they were certainly available as add-ons for both the CPC and PCW.