[asher]

My Dad had a Vector in the 80s - learned a lot from it. It had a big reset button on the front, which instantly booted into the "monitor" - a program which let you inspect and disassemble RAM. (RAM was not erased in the reboot.)

You could, of course use the monitor to disassemble the monitor, which was a good way to learn assembly language.

Later I wired an Atari joystick to the machine - it had some kind of GPIO pins. It was a very hackable platform, with S100 slots, tons of space inside, and lots of DSUB cutouts on the rear panel.

Wrote several video games in Z80 for that machine, although graphics were limited to TRS-80 style 6-pixels-per-character.

Later I found out that Disney Imagineering built a loudspeaker monitoring multiplexer around a similar S100 computer. It allowed a sound technician to remotely choose an amp output to monitor. I wonder how many other cool applications these machines enabled.