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I was always curious whether having one computer had an impact on what we chose later.
 

IF I had a C64 in the beginning,  I would have choosen an Amiga afterwards. So far my answer regarding your question.Because the CPC wasn't my first computer, sorry for undermining your voting. I did not even had any 8bit computer in the beginning at all. Poor parents, no money left at all. Heavy influenced by the more welthy computer owners, who had my 'dream machine' back in the days, I choosed an Amiga when I got my first own money.

Sadly, it wasn't until much later that I had the opportunity to catch up on everything I had missed back then. Collecting 'old' 8 bits became my hobby.
So I came in contact with many, many siblings of those machines.
Today, I'm in the luck position to have a hobby room.
There are 3 eight bits, I like the most.
Amstrad/Schneider CPC is one of them.
I like its easy to learn quite powerful basic,
its 80 column screen, and the fast diskdrive.
If I had this experience back in the days, together
with the money needed, I had choosen the CPC as
a/my 'working horse' computer.

Steven

An Amstrad PC3386 with 4Mb RAM and 50Mb Hard drive and later, a Sound Blaster Pro 2. My 6128 was 7 years old at this time, but I used it for 5 more years or so.

@Steven - I can't say that my parents were poor, but they preferred to spend money on a wall unit, or a vacuum cleaner, or a small Fiat car, than on a computer for kid. I bought 6128 myself when I was 19y old, 7 years after its premiere. I wrote more about this in several posts here:
https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/general-discussion/cpc-underpowered-for-1984/msg234995/#msg234995
I bought it because at that time it was the cheapest computer with a FDD and 80 columns, and I didn't even know that its Basic and drive were much faster than other 8-bit computers.

No impact

Got a PC in 93 when there was no other choice (Atari and Amiga was already dying)

I made a technology watch for a year and eventually bought a 486DX33 with ET4000 on the very first local bus (Eisa Opti before VLB) and a Gravis Ultrasound and that was my best computer years (honestly beyond CPC)

All my money from my summer jobs was in it

Quote from: roudoudou on 08:19, 14 April 24No impact

Got a PC in 93 when there was no other choice (Atari and Amiga was already dying)

I made a technology watch for a year and eventually bought a 486DX33 with ET4000 on the very first local bus (Eisa Opti before VLB) and a Gravis Ultrasound and that was my best computer years (honestly beyond CPC)

All my money from my summer jobs was in it

I can copy&paste this.
My Gravis came 2 years later, but everything else was exactly the same here (year, CPU, graphic card) :D
It took 1 year before I moved from the CPC to the PC regarding programming.

For some reason moving on to the 1040STFM felt so natural to me...

After the CPC I helped the son of some friends of the family with his school tasks and earned my first PC XT.

Seagate 30mb hard drive, Hercules graphics card, 5.25" Floppy disk drive and atomic green monitor  :laugh:

After that I got a 486DX 25Mhz PC, and a 486 DX4 at a whooping 100 Mhz.

From there I've lost count of the different desktops and laptops I've had...

Got my CPC 464 Christmas 86, sold it ~Feb 90 for about £200(had a load of original games) and saved up the £200 from summer work for an Amiga A500 which i bought in October but wasnt allowed have it until Christmas '90 but i regularly snuck it out of the closet when the parents werent around  ;D

I upgraded it to 2.5MB ram in 91 for DPaint. 
Got a loan of an Amiga 2000(ended up keeping it until my brothers wife threw it out grrr) in 91 with 8Meg RAM, 20 meg hard drive, multisync monitor, PC 286 card. Which i used for 3D modeling/rendering, DPaint animations etc. loved it although it was a bit noisy, got a video capture card(loved capturing Star Wars space battle scenes with it) and audio capture card for it later.
Bought an Amiga 1200 in October '92, still have it, upgraded that with 100MB harddrive and 68030/50 accelerator with FPU, 4MB ram(later swapped for 8MB).

I used the A1200 until 1999 where i was gifted a PS1 for Christmas with a load of games, bought a PS2 in Paris 2001, a PC in 2003 and have been building PC's since getting the odd console for exclusives in between(PS3, PS4).

Current PC i built last year is AMD 7800x3D with AIO, 32Gig Ram, 4070Ti, about 4TB NVME and 6TB regular HD.

I think, the CPC with its 80 column mode and perfect display on a green screen somehow laid the foundation for what was important to me in a computer system. Initially I wanted to get a C64 - and I'm, not sure that I would have gotten into programming and creative usage as much as I did with the CPC.

In late 1988 and early 1989 the CPC was pretty much dead in my area. Most friends already moved on to the ST or the Amiga. I didn't like the Amiga - but the normal ST was not yet compelling enough. I would have loved to get an Acorn Archimedes but it was hard to get software and it was just too expensive for me. Then Atari came out with the STe. I liked the additional features, the hardware scrolling, Blitter, 8bit DMA sound on top of the things that I already liked from the ST, especially  the monochrome screen and its quality for programming, DTP and other (semi-)professional stuff.

I was trying to get one as soon as they "should" appear in the shops. But "the ship was delayed" - over and over again. Atari really managed to screw up the launch as almost no machines were available for Christmas. How stupid! I was one of the few that managed to get a STe before christmas. For weeks I rang every shop I knew in the area every couple of days - and then finally, a single computer shop in Munich got a delivery short before christmas. So on December 22nd or maybe 23rd, I went to the city on the train and I bought my STe. A friend helped carrying the monitor ;-)

This was an intense time as I dived into different areas, e.g. Sample sound, DTP, I did a lot of schoolwork with it - and of course also some programming. As I did much more creative work than gaming, I then constantly upgraded the STe. To 4MB (primarily for sound sampling), put it into a tower case (to brag), added a HD floppy drive, then a 48MB SCSI drive. On the CPC I was a huge fan of the game Elite. And then on the ST "Frontier - Elite II" was released. And again I had to find a shop that still offered Atari ST games (after Atari screwed up the STe release lots of shops in the area got rid of Atari STs) - and I got my copy. But it was SOOOOO slow... more like a slideshow - the last reason I needed to get my final expansion for the STe: A 28MHz 68000 upgrade. What a beast. What a performance :-)

Some time later a Falcon 030 replaced the STe but in autumn 1995 I had to move on to the PC. Due to my experience with graphics and sound on the ST and Falcon I could get a job at a a start-up company where I had to work with PCs. And the creative software that came out on that platform was amazing. So a Pentium 90 moved in. Of course again with focus on creativity, not necessarily gaming.

An Acorn Archimedes (A3000).

Its 32 bit CPU named ARM Incidentally stood for "Acorn Risc Machine" because it was created in-house by Acorn in England, and is world-famous today.

From a technical point of view, the Acorn Archimedes was a very impressive home computer - especially when changing from 8-bit CPC to 32-bit Archimedes, which was a true quantum leap.

But due to very poor marketing, the Archimedes was not very popular in countries other than England (and maybe Norway). A great pity. The CPC market and the CPC community was much better.

Please @ZorrO, include this unique home computer in your options list as well. Thank you.

Quote from: eto on 14:30, 14 April 24I didn't like the Amiga - but the regular ST wasn't convincing enough yet.

Funny - exactly my thoughts at the time. And today, looking back, I too would have found the Atari STE to be a very attractive CPC successor.

I first had a green screen CPC 464 (second hand, I suspect it was one of the original 50 - high keys, came with a back catalogue of ACU/CWTA from issue 1). That was a great present given the usage I got out of everything.

That was great - I think that was end-of-1988.

I then got a CPC 6128 (catalogue job, my parents must have paid that off for a long time) with colour monitor. That must have been end-of-1990. That got a lot of use too, and by this time I was programming in BASIC (all those magazine type-ins had set me up!) and using Advanced OCP Art Studio.

I then got a second hand A500 for £50 from a school friend. That must have been during 1992. The fact it was available was a key part of the decision to buy that, but also I had mates with Amigas, and it was clearly a great machine, and it had DPaint and AMOS, and Monkey Island II, and SimCity. I had another friend with an ST and it was good but it wasn't Amiga-good.

I got an A1200 later on, probably 1994, I think after it had dropped to £299. I did have that computer as my primary computer until 1998, I got a proper monitor for it, and an '040 accelerator.

I /feel/ like I had each computer for a long long time, but in reality it seems not. Time passes slowly when you're young.

The Amiga 500, my favorite 16bit machine  ;D

Something else, it's a 6128plus. 8) 8) 8)

Quote from: GUNHED on 16:26, 15 April 24Something else, it's a 6128plus. 8) 8) 8)

you bought a Plus when it came out?

Quote from: eto on 16:27, 15 April 24

Quote from: GUNHED on 16:26, 15 April 24Something else, it's a 6128plus. 8) 8) 8)

you bought a Plus when it came out?

Yes, in 1992, few months after that I already found out how to use all the new features. Did send an article at CPC Amstrad International. And unexpectedly they did throw 400 DM at me. After that I never got a better computer.
For my job some day I did need a PC, later a laptop, but the never could do what my CPCs can do.  :) :) :)

Quote from: eto on 16:27, 15 April 24

Quote from: GUNHED on 16:26, 15 April 24Something else, it's a 6128plus. 8) 8) 8)

you bought a Plus when it came out?

If we're going down that route in 1990 so did I! It was the first computer I bought with my own money after the CPC464 my parents and grandparents had got us for Christmas 87. What's more I still have it and it sits in my home office all setup ready to go whenever the mood takes me!

Did anyone here ever see or use one of these French Thomson computers (https://youtu.be/Tbve3XyCGUU?si=aUrru9tF1IdF5dJw)?

Apparently they sold 500K only in la France! But there were 5 models that were not compatible with each other (which is pretty stupid considering all competitors were offering that: apparently with Thomson, the only advantage was that devices worked in every model as they used the same connectors).

Quote from: cwpab on 18:16, 15 April 24Did anyone here ever see or use one of these French Thomson computers (https://youtu.be/Tbve3XyCGUU?si=aUrru9tF1IdF5dJw)?

Yes, roudoudou:
https://www.cpcwiki.eu/forum/general-discussion/what-computer-did-you-have-before-cpc/msg238429/#msg238429
But he had it BEFORE :P

Quote from: GUNHED on 16:31, 15 April 24For my job some day I did need a PC, later a laptop, but the never could do what my CPCs can do.  :) :) :)

Thanks to WinApe my PCs can do the same like my CPCs since more than 20 years :laugh:

" some better 8bit "

Really now?

;D

In this order:

Atari PC-3
Amstrad PC3086

and after that, all OEM clones:

386SX
486DX2
Pentium II
Core2 duo
i7 920
i7 8700K

and then computers provided by my employer:

Macbook Pro (Intel)
Macbook Pro (M1 Max)

From CPC 6128 I did a long jump to a 486 DX with 33 MHz, 4 MBytes of RAM, and a SVGA graphics card with a TSENG chipset that could easily be controlled also from BASIC. The storage was done with a 20 MByte hard drive. Also a SoundBlaster was available.

Especially for assembly programming on 486: Every register is an accumulator, every register is 32 bits wide, most commands are executed in a single cycle ... Z80 assembly is so much more complicated. But addressing on Z80 is simple: 16 bit registers, 64 KBytes of memory, and some additional banks to swap in. On DOS you have to work with small memory segments and six segment registers in addition to the register holding the address, also in combination with swapping in everything above 1 MByte. Only in protected mode these limits did no longer exist. But getting there was complicated ...

Quote from: lightforce6128 on 03:54, 16 April 24From CPC 6128 I did a long jump to a 486 DX with 33 MHz, 4 MBytes of RAM, and a SVGA graphics card with a TSENG chipset that could easily be controlled also from BASIC. The storage was done with a 20 MByte hard drive. Also a SoundBlaster was available.

Especially for assembly programming on 486: Every register is an accumulator, every register is 32 bits wide, most commands are executed in a single cycle ... Z80 assembly is so much more complicated. But addressing on Z80 is simple: 16 bit registers, 64 KBytes of memory, and some additional banks to swap in. On DOS you have to work with small memory segments and six segment registers in addition to the register holding the address, also in combination with swapping in everything above 1 MByte. Only in protected mode these limits did no longer exist. But getting there was complicated ...

On DOS there was DPMI to EASILY access every memory as one linear segment in 32 bits :) (Watcom C + Tasm FTW)

And before DPMI, demomakers used "real" mode which was rude

Quote from: Prodatron on 19:03, 15 April 24

Quote from: GUNHED on 16:31, 15 April 24For my job some day I did need a PC, later a laptop, but the never could do what my CPCs can do.  :) :) :)

Thanks to WinApe my PCs can do the same like my CPCs since more than 20 years :laugh:

Hope you get your CPC fixed soon after that 20 years.  ;) :laugh:

I got a sega sc3000h and c64c after I got my cpc but they weren't successors, that would be an Amiga 500.  My cpc is still the most fun computer I have outside of video games.

Amstrad CPC 664 in 1985, Amstrad PC 1512 double 5,25" disks in 1988 which I bought myself at 18 years old having starting to work during summer since the age of 16.

Only 50 people reading this forum?  Come on!

Yes, it's like calling on the desert.  ::)

Maybe only 50 have a keyboard?  :D

Amiga 2000 with second drive, 1MB, external sampler and the PC-XT card. I could play Flight Simulator on both the XT and the amiga, connected via 0 Modem cable on a single machine.... Unfortunately, I could only see on screen in full, or both screens in half :)