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Comment by pryelluw | Hacker News Reader

That is some hard hitting copy. I wonder how it performed …

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 had a C64. I meant how the copy itself performed. :)

I interpreted the copy initially as justifying the product being twice the price of the competition. My eyes are used to much more concise copy nowadays though so maybe it landed properly back then?

Like: For $595 you get what nobody else can give you (and it's only) for twice the price.

I think the intended meaning is actually we give you better performance than the competition, which sells at double or more our low price of $595 (i.e., they compare the C64 favorably to other computers ranging from $899 to $1565.)

Yeah I realised once I read the comparison chart in the ad.

It's also possible that the ambiguity was intentional.. Ad copy is an art and it did compel me to read all of it to unpack the meaning. Though thinking this through I would assume that everyone interested in computers at the time would know what the prices of other products were so the $595 would immediately be understood as very cheap in comparison

You could touch type on that horrible keyboard? I learned to type on typewriters at school, but never could very well on my C64 with its elevated, mushy keyboard.

I too learned on a typewriter (IBM Selectric, if memory serves). Yes, the C64 keyboard was pretty crap, but still better than not being able to rearrange text.

How would you print back then? Did you also own a printer?

Epson fx-80

Yes, a dot matrix printer.

It was life changing at the time. They sold something like 15 million units. Everyone was running a commodore in my neck of the woods.

It's interesting because when I read "For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price" all my brain does is parse that sentence as they are charging double what they should because there's no competition.

It's not until I scroll down to the pricing table to see what they really mean is their machine is half the price while having more features than the rest.

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