Hello from China!
Posted: Fri Jul 03, 2020 5:32 am
I am an expat professor teaching in English before our students transfer to the US.
My first computer was a Timex Sinclair, which turned out to be closet compatible, but the next summer when I had the chance to buy better, I was shopping for the cheapest home computer with a real keyboard and disk drive, which was the C64. I used it to edit my undergrad senior thesis, play a few type in with error check magazine games and get started programming in Forth. I took a Epson Geneva with me to the Peace Corps, and got a C128D when I got back... which I all too soon fried with a power tap for my parallel printer interface which didn't have the block inserted to prevent plugging in upside down and shorting out the datasette lines connected directly to the processor.
So it was my old C64 breadbox and portable color TV with bad ghosting on one color which was the computer I took to grad school in the late 80s early 90s. My daisywheel printer was slow but looked prettier than classmates with IBM pcs and dot matrix printers, and my 1581 which survived my C128D dying worked fine with my warpspeed cartridge.
But I got a cheap Amstrad double floppy transportable with flip up LCD screen and it was on my PC compatible I did my only serious programming, a brute force maximum entropy estimator of an economic Input-Output model. It took near a day to do a run, while I am sure with the right R package I could do it today in a couple of minutes.
I went off for a decade to teach in Australia, and played around with Forth now and again, but if I turned on my PC for research it was mostly using Excel to figure out what suspect games public planning agencies were playing with public transport cost benefit analysis.
Now there are no kids in the house, and I have some notions I never followed up on in the 80s which would be a lot more pleasant to play around with on the CX16 than on a C64. So I can't wait to get my hand on a CX16c or e (depending on what I can afford with 8 grandkids to get gifts for).