[gttalbot]

The most significant of these, the Commodore 64, had a social leveling effect as well. The Apple II and the IBM PC were essentially unaffordable for all but the well off. However, selling 10 million Commodore 64s at essentially 1/4-1/8 the price of the Apple II allowed a generation of working class kids to have upward mobility and real careers. Didn't hurt that in some ways the Commodore 64 was a better computer as well.

[greenbit]

With the C64, you just knew what the machine was capable of, from the myriad games to be had, but the BASIC gave no direct support for any of that good stuff. The only graphics you could do from BASIC were the character cell glyphs (line segments, box corners, etc) like some kind of glorified color version of the PET. And forget about sound. Remember the first time you loaded a game that you had to RUN, and instead you did a LIST, only to see

    10 sys(2063)

.. or the like? Yeah, clearly there were Mysteries that needed solving!

It just begged you to use PEEK and POKE, to get at the real goodies. In a way this was an almost ideal precursor for learning assembly language; PEEK and POKE got you used to the idea of loading and storing things to memory or device registers, and then when you loaded up Jim Butterfield's SuperMon (thanks, Jim, wherever you are) and started banging around under the hood, heck, there were LDA and STA, ready and waiting. But a zillion times faster!

[cbm-vic-20]

Or in my case, the VIC-20. My working class parents got one for me for Christmas in the early 80s. It introduced me to programming BASIC and assembly language at a young age, which formed the foundation of a career that has given me financial stability that they never had.