It was pretty hard to lick the C-64 in its time.. particularly, after the
first big price drop when I believe they fell to the $399.00 point.
Difficult to find a machine with that level of graphics & sound
(IMPORTANT!!), plus almost 40K directly accessible to BASIC in that era.
The real hang-up was the price of the 1541 drive - but the C-64 itself
offered so much promise, that a lot of folks had no problem shelling out
the additional $399.00 for a disk drive - at which point, the system really
began to shine.
On Thu, Apr 17, 2014 at 11:48 PM, Mark J. Blair <nf6x at nf6x.net> wrote:
Way back in the late 1980s when I worked part time at
an Amiga dealer, I
got an abandoned Plus/4 from the junk pile in the repair shop and
occasionally used it as a doorstop. It didn't work very well for that
purpose, because it's not especially heavy. :)
I don't know if I still have it, but if I ever run across it then I'll see
if I can bring it back to life. I didn't respect it much back then, but now
it would be an interesting little piece of history.
It's funny how we tended to divide into cliques back then, convinced that
"our" machine is infinitely better than the other brand's piece of
worthless junk... not realizing that they often had the exact same CPU
inside. I cut my teeth on a TRS-80 Color Computer, so naturally, I thought
those were special. Now I realize that they had an arguably better
processor than many of the contemporaries, yet those other machines had
their own good features such as better graphics and/or sound hardware, more
than one expansion slot, good keyboards, etc. Now, they're all good and bad
in their own individual ways, and I like playing with and learning about
all of them! Except for the PCs. I still don't like those. :)
--
Mark J. Blair, NF6X <nf6x at nf6x.net>
http://www.nf6x.net/