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@sdarlington @cstross @keyboards
It also had the advantage of a cheap expansion port which allowed third parties to produce add-on packs for mice, extra RAM and graphics capabilities, coprocessors, hard drive connectors and I don’t know what else. Well before these things were affordable on IBM clones. And it was easy to hack physically, hence mine had a DD 3·5″ drive within a year.
@electropict @sdarlington @keyboards I bought an original 8256 the month it came out. By the time I sold it and switched to a PC it had 512Kb of RAM,a second (720K) 3" floppy drive, an external 10Mb hard disk, and was spending all its time running CP/M.
@cstross @sdarlington @keyboards
And multiple programming languages were available. You could draw and print the Mandelbrot set on them, if you had half a day or so spare.
They were great, for the time. As long as no-one wanted to use a TV or radio nearby at the same time. Shielded they were not, and the mice cables packed a punch across the spectrum. Which is how I became a creature of the night. 
@electropict @sdarlington @keyboards Yup, the PCW left me in ZERO doubt that Van Eck phreaking was possible! (Get a B&W TV set with a portable antenna and point it at the PCW at short range and you could—very fuzzily—pick up the screen!)
@cstross @sdarlington @keyboards
Sadly, young folks just don’t have the opportunities to learn these things any more... We should do something about it.