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

> The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive.

Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).

> My friends who had one just played games.

Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!

Commodore BASIC (which was really a variant of Microsoft BASIC IIRC) was so awful.

No drawing commands. No real control over the computer's graphics modes. Very limited control over sprites. No great commands for the SID (arguably the best soundchip of any 8-bit system). Everything is done with POKEs and magic numbers. Slow as hell. And the list goes on.

Just dreadful.

I'd go as far as to say that in many of the ways that mattered, and even taking into account the weird key combinations required to write code, and the fact that it wasn't particularly well regarded either, but I think Sinclair BASIC on the ZX Spectrum range was actually better. You had drawing commands, you had sound commands (although the PLAY command on the 128K honestly didn't give you that much access to the power of the Yamaha FM soundchip so it still wasn't great, and on 48K you were limited to BEEP). You didn't have sprites but you had UDGs and they were easy to use. And I think it might have run faster - it certainly felt faster.

It did still have some annoying oversights: e.g., want to read the joystick? Well, I can't remember the damned address but in the end I figured out enough to realise I was going to have to PEEK the right location in memory, which I duly did after a quick study of the memory map and trying out a bunch of different addresses.

Anyway, point is I remember being so frustrated when I upgraded/crossgraded from a ZX Spectrum 128K +2A to a C64 with how difficult it was to get anything done in BASIC.

>(I managed to synchronize the tape drive properly only once and played "Winter Games")

Odd; the Commodore Datasette is about as reliable as a microcomputer tape storage system can be, far more so than the tin cans-on-a-string designs of Sinclair and TRS-80. Did you attempt to use a regular cassette recorder with a third-party adapter?

Not OP, but In 1983 I was 13 and I won a scholarship to a summer camp that rented space in a rich kid prep school for computer camp. I learned pascal over two weeks and the following summer I went back and learned assembly. Three years later I built a 286 and fortunately lived near the Yale bookstore and it had a book on 286 assembly. Basically being a middle class kid adjacent to rich people is how I learned assembly at a young age. If it wasn’t for that camp I wouldn’t have learned computer architecture, logic, and assembly until college. Zip code matters.

I had a Radio Shack Color Computer and Radio Shack actually sold a ROM cartridge (right alongside all the game cartridges) that was an editor/assembler. That's how I got started in assembler. The manual that came with it covered using the assembler itself but only had a minimal overview of 6809 CPU assembly language. Pretty strange that you could pick up an assembly language IDE at your local Radio Shack store (with over 7000 locations, virtually every town in the U.S. had at least one Radio Shack).

My teenaged self actually looked up Motorola in the phone book and called their offices asking for information on how to program their CPU. Some nice salesperson there took pity on me and sent me their 6809 reference manual along with a quick reference card for free. The manual was quite a sizable book that I wasn't fully ready to understand yet but that reference card was my constant companion. I still have it today. :-)