In the summer of 1987 I mowed yards 7 days a week, 4-6 hours per day to earn enough money to buy an Amstrad PC 1512. I was 10 years old and when I finally got to unbox it and power it up, it was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me.
I was a bit frustrated because all my friends had CPC 6168 and were constantly trading games. At this time the PC games were a lot less common (and more expensive) it pushed me to start programming with GEM Basic.
The 128kbytes of RAM are bank switched, so it's better than a 64kbyte machine but not as much better as you'd hope.
On the family VIC-20 I basically reached the limits of what was practical to do with it. I ran out of RAM, my programs became too slow and unwieldy to use. I never got there with the CPC 6128 but I could certainly feel where the limits were, closer than you'd like, and it often caused me not to set off in a particular direction knowing I'd soon run into a wall anyway. I wrote some simple assembly language but never tried to run a real high level language (other than the built-in BASIC).
Whereas on my 486sx25 and subsequent machines it was only ever a matter of time and money, so that was always on me.
I still have the mouse somewhere.
Did you have dual floppy drives or one?
I lost years to Elite. Loved it. Haven’t been as engrossed in a computer game before or since...