For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]

I was wowed when I first got home Internet in 1995 because it was so much more than the BBSs I’d been using up to that point, but nothing has recreated the sense of wonder I had on 8-bit machines in the 80s. Even when I bought a secondhand PC in the late 80s, going through the hand-labelled disks was like a treasure hunt. That’s how I first discovered Hack/Nethack, played Leygref’s Castle and started learning Borland Turbo Pascal.

After the Tomy Tutor, we started with a C64 and then later a C128. Both were in regular use pretty much through high school.

It's a fair cop against the II+ but there are other things in the comparison which are mildly hinky. I find their characterization of POKEY a little unfair, even though I think SID is superior, and the CP/M option on the C64 was nearly useless because the 1541 didn't read MFM formats. (Much more useful on the C128, but you needed a 1571 disk drive, and by 1985 CP/M was on its way out.) The keyboard criteria are also somewhat of an Apples-to-Commodores comparison, so to speak. Still, it's hard-hitting ad copy and it was Tramiel's Commodore -- he was determined to win, by golly.

It was a great little machine. I had one and used it for many years. Played many a game on it, dabbled a bit in programming, and also used it to write pretty much every paper I wrote in high school.

Back then, the alternatives were a typewriter or hand writing everything. Since I could touch type, hand writing was slower and neither alternative allowed for the kind of easy editing that is enabled by even a primitive word processor.

But yeah, mostly I played games on it. It was a great gaming machine for its time.

I was just a little kid then, and the C64 was a neat micro, but today I can see some questionable things about their comparison matrix in the ad.

Obviously, they are comparing to only the high-end competitors (e.g., Atari 800 but not the 400, and no TI 99/4A which also used their own chips like Commodore touted as a selling point, nor the TRS-80 Color Computer that was intended for home use unlike the Model III business computer). Buyers who knew the real set of alternatives, at and below the C64's price point, might question why they need 64KB RAM, when the popular lower-priced competitors not shown in the table also did fine games and Basic programming (the main uses of home computers) while costing less money.

Then there's structuring "TV Output" as a feature of the C64, which they say the TRS-80 Model III doesn't have. But that's because the TRS-80 has an integrated display monitor, while the C64 includes no display in that price comparison.

I don't know what "'Smart' Peripherals" are. But that IBM PC defined industry standard peripheral interfaces for years.

The competitors also had obvious strengths not shown. Want your word processor to be in crisp 80-column text? A real spreadsheet program? Math coprocessor? Better graphics? Option to upgrade to a hard disk drive?