Greetings,
A few months ago I was delighted when I learned the Deutsch word "Hamsterkauf".
It is my turn to expose a word from the country where I was born: "Estraperlo".
"Estraperlo" comes from the name of an electrical roulette made by two Dutch men called Strauss and Perlowitz. Albeit gambling was forbidden during the Second Spanish Republic, top public officials gave permission to them to operate. This corruption scandal was soon discovered and as most officials in the government were involved (including prominent members as the PM Lerroux and the mayor of Barcelona) prompted the third and last elections of the period, literally destroying the center-right parties and polarizing the country which went into a crude civil war not long after. When the war was over the word was associated with the black market and, after the postwar famine, with anything related to corruption, illegalities, black markets, etc.
You may be asking yourself: "Fine, but why is this guy talking about this in an old computers forums?". Well, to be fair, this is the Amstrad forums, I'm talking about Spain and also about something wrong (maybe even illegal) that shouldn't have ever happened. Knowing those facts, you may be already guessing what's going next.
The responsibles of this lied both to the authorities and to their users because they didn't want to pay some taxes... Spanish picaresque at its finest. It is not clear if it was Amstrad itself who gave the order or was the filial company in Spain who did it. Nevertheless, they never got caught. This is the second model, so "Ñ" key and standard BASIC 1.0 ROM (464)... was the older model it would have British keyboard and BASIC 1.1 (664).
I imagine that as it can only be found in Spain it may be rare to see this piece of hardware around this forums, so I thought you may be interested in seeing it.
Regards,
Jaume
