When William Shattner started doing Commodore Vic20 commercials, I found that I just had to have a Vic20. It had nothing to do with Captain Kirk of course, but those comparison commercials wherein the Vic20 features were compared to other computers was very convincing to this 14 year old.
I saved every penny from my paper route and got $350 to buy the "Wonder computer of the 80's". I got the tape deck unit with the Vic20 and a few books and progs. Without the tape deck, it would have been little better than a gaming console.
Fast forward through the 80's and my intense love of playing and creating games continued. The Commodore 64 was purchased by my wife and I and we used it to create college reports. My first good paying job I got an used Amiga1000. It was a wonderfully frustrating machine as any changes to it were expensive. Besides, the IBM PC era for the home had finally arrived.
We sold the Amiga and bought an Amstrad PC-20. It was affordable, had EGA video and sound and two floppy drives - no hard drive. It did not run Windows but included GEM which is similar to the black and white Apple Macintosh OS.
Improving on the machine meant opening the flip top and plugging in ISA PC cards. There were only 2 slots. Oh yeah, and the lid did not close after a card was plugged in.
It was a strange PC and we didn't have it long before buying a full IBM PC compatible with memory, VGA graphics, Soundblaster, a CD reader and all. Overall, I've enjoyed every computer that I've ever owned - except the Amstrad PC-20.
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