The PCW 8256 (abbreviation for "Personal Computer Word-processor") gave consumers a very complete package for not even a quarter of the price of the cheapest IBM PCs on the market at the time. During its introduction, the PCW 8256 was sold for just £399. This was very low, as compared to other computers which had prices in the thousands. The £399 was the pricing for the entire system; which included: the computer itself, a monitor, a 3" floppy drive (built into the computer), a keyboard, a printer, the CP/M Plus operating system, the word processor Locoscript, BASIC and the interpreter Logo.

The marketing of the PCW was aimed at 'technophobic' households, who had not (yet) switched over to computers. In the famous advertisements, the slogan "more than a word processor for less than most typewriters" was used frequently. Other notable properties of the computer included: computer keys for actions such as copying and pasting and a user-friendly wordprocessor. These factors contributed to the fact that the PCW was very easy to work with by people new to computers.

This strategy payed off massively. In the first two years alone, Amstrad sold approximately 700,000 of these machines. Amstrad gained a strong grip on the computer market: their market shares in the United Kingdom were as high as 60% and stood second overall in Europe, behind only IBM.