Elsewhere we've had some discussion about various non-6502 machines. I wondered, what machine did you first get after 6502? And how did you choose it?

My own next machine was an Amiga 500. (I'd had my eye on the ARM-based Archimedes machines but they were too pricey.) I liked the look of the Amiga for the 68000, the sophisticated OS, the very capable graphics, the built-in floppy, the large memory. I'd also considered the Atari ST but as far as I could tell it wasn't quite so capable. It was just a little less expensive, I think, so I felt I was taking a bit of a gamble. There were plenty of magazines, which one could read for free in the newsagents, and there were also technical books, which one could read for free in the bookshops.

IIRC, by this time I'd used Vaxes and Apollo and maybe Sun workstations at work. I think I hadn't yet used a PC, although as a reader of BYTE magazine I was aware of them. They seemed to need a lot of arcane knowledge to use. I'd probably also used a Mac, thinking about it, but that was far too expensive to even consider.

Of course, eventually I came back to the 6502!

My brother-in-law gave me a retired PC-AT with DOS and a monochrome monitor in the early 90s. It was fun to learn a different platform ... that's about the best compliment I can give it, other than the fact that the price was right.

Mike B.

After the C=64 there was a 386 PC in the early 90s. But I didn't have a say in that. And - no opinion whatsoever.

My next machine after the 6502-based Atari 800XL was a 68000-based Atari ST.

Back around '85, the 68000-based Atari ST and CBM Amiga were the next logical step for users of the previous generation of 8-bit machines. Having used the Atari for a couple of years I was a great fan of Jay Miner (the chip architect) and my choice would have been to move up to his Amiga platform. Specifically, the Amiga 500 was my target.

I couldn't do it, though. The price delta was too much so I settled for the ST. I'd spent a couple of years playing with the fancy hardware of the 800, and Atari's relatively unsophisticated ST was a bit disappointing, initially. The early fun, though, was in learning 68000. Then, given the lack of fancy hardware sprites, the fun was putting together optimized software sprites and finding other ways to make things move around the screen at speed.

A friend of mine bought an Amiga 500, and I was a little envious. I do like to play with fancy hardware...

After the VIC-20 I sort of took a break from computers (I know, I know, that sentence doesn't even make sense today), then the Atari ST. That took me all the way up to Minix (horribly slow, but it worked) and a uucp package that got me into the Internet ("You're using a what?" was the reaction of the provider back then). Then switched to the 386DX and a stack of Linux floppies.

The first computer I ever used was a Commodore PET-2001, at a friend's house in 1978 or so. Later on (1979), I ended up at a school that had a PET-2001, a CBM-4032 and a CBM-8032.

My father was working at a municipal automation center in 1984 and he brought home one of the first IBM PC's in the country (the Netherlands). I didn't like it much at first (unlike the Commodore keyboards I was used to, a lot of characters used for programming BASIC needed a shift key), but I started learning about it. Not much later, the IBM PC was replaced by an XT. Then in 1987 or so, my dad started working for Philips and we got a Compaq Deskpro 386 in the house. A little later he brought home a Philips XT clone (P3102) that no-one was using anymore, and that became the first computer I owned. It had a Philips CM8833 monitor that could be connected to a TV tuner that I bought in the Philips employees shop, and that was my first TV. I also got my first VCR around that time: a Philips 2020 from a flea market. I used all of these for many years.

Later on, I owned one more 6502 computer: an Atari 800XL. But I never used it, I got it from a neighbor and he didn't have the cassette recorder anymore, nor any documentation.

I also owned an Amiga 500 and an Amiga 3000 but I've mostly used PC compatibles since 1984.

===Jac

After the C64 my Dad got us a 386DX2 running at 33mhz. It had 4MB of RAM, a 110MB hard drive and a 2400 baud modem. The funny thing that we didn't really use Windows on it too much, we instead had GeoWorks.

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My 6502 Game System: https://hackaday.io/project/9325-dodo-6502-homebrew-game-system

Lots of the same here. I went from SX64 to 386DX/16, to work at home for some CAD stuff for my dad's employer. It had the 1MB of conventional RAM, but with an additional 256KB of extended memory, a very strange and generally useless amount. Because it was for CAD work, I also got a 12" tablet with a 16-button puck with crosshairs. That was seriously awesome back then. I think it was something like $3100 for the whole setup, which I paid off working instead of having to lay out money up front.

I still have the SX64. I don't have the 386.

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WFDis Interactive 6502 Disassembler
AcheronVM: A Reconfigurable 16-bit Virtual CPU for the 6502 Microprocessor

After my C64 I got a second hand 386SX for my first year varsity projects.

It had a Mono-Hercules screen card so it was quite interesting to play games like Solitaire where with red and black looked the same on the screen

Before, I had a TI-99/4A, after my 6510 (Commodore 64), I had an Amiga 500. I didn’t like the Amiga because of its slow disk drive. Also there was no info or software to me available to program it in assembler. I had it for less than a year when I sold it. Thereafter I bought a Highscreen 286 13 MHz with 1MB RAM, 5.25” and 3.5” disk drives, a 20MB Hard disk and an EGA card.

The C64 however was the most fun, exciting and educational!

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Marco

I went KIM-1 to Atari 800. After that, I bought the early Macintosh -- all 128K of it. I upgraded the Mac to 512, got the new ROMs, got the 800k drives.

Then, I got a TRS-80 Model 100.

I, later, sold the Mac, and use the money for a motorcycle (one of the better trades I've done).

Next -- heh.. "next" --, I bought a, well, NeXTStation slab, boosted it to 20M RAM and a 400M drive. Used it to get USENET and email over a 2400 baud Hayes modem.

I then bought a 66Mhz 486 PC, but it didn't last long, as I donated it to a friend for a project we were doing.

Finally, I bought 133Mhz PC running W98, then a 400MHz, then a 1.2GHz, then I bought a Mac Pro. After 9 years, I bought a new Mac Pro, which was 3 years ago. What I learned going through the PC upgrade process was that upgrading the PC was a lie. The only thing that survived from one build to the other was the CD-ROM drive, everything else was replaced.

I also bought a Mac 520C laptop in there somewhere long ago, and my wife is on her 3rd Mac laptop, currently a couple year old MacBook. Not seeing much need to replace that laptop any time soon.

I have a stack of iPhones, iPads, and a creaky old iPod Touch here as well, and a Sun Ultra 10 440Mhz (I think) is stuffed up in the attic.

I've dawdled long enough, time to wake the cat and get her of my lap so I can start the day. She won't be amused. Hard to disturb a sleeping kitty cat.

I wish I had a NeXT! Awesome!

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My 6502 Game System: https://hackaday.io/project/9325-dodo-6502-homebrew-game-system

My first computer after my 6502 was.. another 6502, by way of: Atari 2600, VIC20, C16 then C64. I badly wanted a C128 or a 3.5" floppy disc drive for the C64 but my dad convinced me to get a PC: A 25 MHz Harris 80286 with 4x 256K SIMMs, a real VGA card with 256K RAM that could do mode 13h and a 21MB Connor HDD. The BIOS even had an option to map the topmost 384K to 100000h so there was some XMS even with only 1MB RAM installed. It cost £585 in 1992.

The assembly I'd been taught using Action Replay IV on the C64 made it easier to pick up 8086 using DEBUG.EXE. I remember in-lining assembly in Turbo Pascal to make fast graphics routines for my geography teacher. Not as special as my first raster interrupt routines for the C64 though.

I started with a C64 (unless you count the Atari 2600). Later bought an SX-64 when I started college in 1991 and was able to run Pascal and C on it to duplicate what we were learning in class.
After the C64 was an Amiga 500, and a 20MHz 80286. Upgraded the 286 to a 386 and later a 486, etc from windows 3.1 and ran windows up until XP and it was such a flop after windows 2000 that I moved to Linux. Picked up an Amiga 2000 earlier this year and since I found WDC still making 6502 stuff am reviving a couple old projects.

I started with an Atari 400, upgraded to an 800 XL, and then to an Atari 1040 ST. While the ST was a nice machine, the 800 XL was a bunch more fun and I wish I never sold it.