My second computer was a Commodore 64 (first was a TI-99/4a), and I loved it. Then I moved on to Macs and never looked back.
watch it: retro 1980s Commodore 64 commercial
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You get any rants from anti-Apple fanboys yet?
Not yet.
That price still didn’t get you a monitor (though you could use a TV) or a disc drive (can’t even remember if you get the tape drive, or if that was separate as well…)
Not only was the tape drive separate, you couldn’t use a domestic cassette recorder with Commodore machines the way you could with most of the others. (Then again there were never any problems twiddling with levels.)
My trail: Vic-20, BBC B, BBC Master, Atari ST, PC-compatibles.
First computer I ever used, in high school, was a DEC PDP-8E. The 8 stands for 8K of RAM, I think, although that seems impossibly small now. It had one terminal (no screen, I don’t think: a roll of paper) but most of us used mark sense batch cards. It was amazing at that time to have a computer in a school; most of my contemporaries (i.e. old people) either submitted punch cards to a computer at the school board office, or could not take computer science at all.
After that we used Commodore PET computers and TRS-80s.
My Dad was the computer science teacher; he had been a math teacher, but learned to use computers while working on his Master’s degree.
The first computer we had at home was a TRS-80.
Even though I studied engineering at university, I didn’t have a computer of my own at that time, and none of my classmates did either. We did our work with programmable calculators or on the university mainframe in a computer lab. In fourth year I used a PC for the first time for project in process controls, but Engineering students entering the university that year were required to buy a PC.