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That's a really good observation and I agree. I sometimes have to pinch myself to make sure I'm not dreaming when I see that there are actually pretty affordable machines with these insane amounts of RAM. (I think the first machine I personally[0] owned had 512K or something like that.)

[0] Well, my dad bought it, but y'know. He wasn't particularly interested, but I think he recognized an interest in computers in me :).

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My first computer had 38911 BASIC BYTES FREE.

Luxury! My first computer (Sinclair ZX Spectrum) had 48KB RAM total, and IIRC 8KB of BASIC RAM available.

Guess I win this round, unless there are older farts than me - Commodore VIC-20 with 3.5KB RAM which was plenty for me to do really cool things with in BASIC and 6502 machine language)

My first computer was a TRS-80 Model 1 with Level 1 BASIC. 4KB of RAM and 4KB of ROM.

It predated the VIC-20 by just under 3 years. You might have had 3.5KB free for BASIC programs but the VIC-20 had a comparatively spacious 5KB of RAM and 20KB of ROM.

I did start earlier than the VIC-20 (with TRS-80 Model 2 at school) but you definitely take the title :)

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