[billyjobob]

Your parents were wrong. Assuming you wanted to play games as well as run productivity software, the C128 was far superior to any PC in 1985. Yes the PC would eventually catch up in the 90s, but the C128 was discontinued by then.

[tverbeure]

I had a C128 in 1986, but I don’t see how it was superior to any PC. The 8086 was faster, it had more memory, it had more expansion slots, and of course there was way more software if you exclude gaming.

In 1988, I had saved up for an Amiga, but my father offered to match what I had saved for a hard drive if I bought a PC instead.

[billyjobob]

Like most kids in the 80s I would never “exclude gaming” from my evaluation.

The PC was 15x as expensive as the C128 and still wasn’t any good for gaming. While C128 had the entire C64 games library available!

It also had the CP/M software library and could run productivity software in 80 columns. Yes CP/M software wasn’t as good as DOS software, yes your spreadsheets didn’t calculate as quickly, but for a couple of years the C128 was the best option, until the Amiga came along.

The Amiga was certainly the best option in 1988. Arguably it was the best until about 1995.

[Gormo]

Of course, DOS had completely caught up in the gaming space within 3-5 years.

[forinti]

8086 wasn't really much faster. It just allowed you to use more memory and was easier to write assembly to.

BASIC was actually slower on the original PC than on the 6502 and the Z80.

[wccrawford]

That's correct in the short term, but my parents were focused on the long-term and that the computer was an investment for my future, rather than a tool/toy for a present.

It wasn't long before I admitted how correct they were.

[billyjobob]

Apparently a typical PC is 1985 cost upwards of $5000. The C128 was $299. So for rich people yes it may have made sense to pay a 15x premium to get hold of tech “from the future, today”. But you could have easily had both. And for a child, both machines would be entirely obsolete by the time the child grew up and entered the workforce, so I would question how much advantage you were really buying.

[ChainOfFools]

$5,000 is nowhere close to accurate for a 'typical' PC of that era. In 1985 or 1986, I don't recall the exact year, my dad purchased a rather exotic machine called a Panasonic Sr. Partner, which was one of the first all-in-one portable PC compatibles on the market. It had built-in dual floppies, I think 384k of memory, a built-in monochrome screen and a built-in printer of all things.

I believe the out of the store price was something like $2,300. With a model below that available for under $2,000, I think with less ram or only one floppy or something. But anyway this was for a fairly atypical take on the PC and a regular white box of the same era could have been had for perhaps half of that with the same or better specs.

[wccrawford]

The numbers I remember were closer to $1500 for the PC, and it wasn't right at the launch of the 128. It had already been out for a while.

That said, I was a kid, so I don't really remember the numbers well.

We were definitely not rich.