Through the breadth of the 80s, I served loyally in the "Commodore"'s fleet...aboard the VIC-20, the 64 and even the Amiga(the USS Indiannapolis of Commodore's American line.) The Amiga was a bit ahead of its time, but quickly got lost in the next wave PC clones. There was a line of games the surpassed all others(on any machine). One house was DMA Design...who years later would become Rockstar, who will forever be enshrined thanks to their Grand Theft Auto games.
In high school, I cut my programming teeth on the (then!) cutting-edge Trash-80s! Tandy/Radio Shack was THE name in the suburbs during that first round of the home computer wars.
To paraphrase the country song, I was nerd, when nerd wasn't cool. One of the defining elements of that time was Bits & Bytes. PBS would jam the short episodes of this admittedly hokey show in after DR WHO or THE TRIPODS. It was where I honed my knowledge about things like "Bootstrapping DOS" and made sure I didn't embrarrass myself by confusing ROM and RAM.
[You may(I doubt it!) recognize Canuck singer/kids TV host Billy Van as the befuddled nerd-in-training]
All the while laughing at friends with IBM clones, with text games like Zork....folks who had to fork out cash for a card that gave them
FOUR COLORS! With no thought of a future as PC slave.
Interestingly(or from my inner cynic, irritatingly!) there is still a thriving Amiga community in Europe. Even the 64 still gets a lotta love. It's like some kind of SLIDERS episode when I cruise the Commodore oriented sites from the UK...a universe where the machines took hold and weren't shortchanged by poor corporate management.
