Commodore 64 Ultimate

I loved Compute!'s Gazette.

I miss good print magazines

In East Germany, the GDR, you could buy C64 and C128 from private sellers advertising in the classified ads section of the major electronics magazine in the GDR. They usually received those devices from relatives in West Germany.

The price for a C64 was thousands of East German Marks, at least half a year of salaries (the salary spread was low, so that's engineers or workers or managers).

An Amiga cost 25,000 Marks towards the end of the GDR, which was about two years of salaries (income was from below 1,000 Marks to ca. 1,500 for high earners, much more than that was unusual). This put 16 bit computing at home or school out of the hands of almost everyone, unless they had generous relatives in the West who sent them one. Even at work, the 8-bit PCs were still much more common (e.g. PC 1715 - https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_1715), with a CP/M clone OS.

But at least they were all available. Our own CAOS (Cassette Aided Operating System- https://www.mpm-kc85.de/html/CAOS_42.htm) 8 bit systems based on Z80 clone CPUs, KC-85 (1/2/3/4) where not too shabby, for work and serious stuff at least the later -3 and even more so the -4 lines were superior to the C64, easier to program, and much more usable screen (https://www.mpm-kc85.de/).

The state was pretty hands-off. My own school's physics teacher started a computer club in the 1980s and he spent thousands of public school money on exclusively Western computers, from ZX spectrum (the very first one) to Atari 800 XL, C64, C128, with both cassette and disk drives. That must have cost a lot. Still surprises me that nobody asked him to buy East German, especially since in the 8-bit range our own systems would have been perfectly fine for the purpose.

They don't need to, but it does seem to be the plan: "every penny goes into manufacturing first, and then to the mission to reboot Commodore itself"

And if that happened, you might not get back on. The line might be busy, you might have run out of time or logins for the day..

I built my own 300bps modem as a teenager, to connect to my C64. Tech was a lot more fun back in the day. It was exciting every year to see the speed of modems go up, and up, and up. 300 bps, 1200bps, and then when I got a 2400bps modem the C64 built-in serial code was too slow, I couldn't transfer files because there were so many dropped bits. So I wrote my own serial port code in assembly language and hacked it into my favorite terminal software (CCGMS) and that fixed the problem. I think by the time I got a 9600 baud modem I probably had an Amiga.

I thought all these were all simulations and not replicas of silicon. I'm talking about something that keeps all the interference flaws and weirdness of the analog synth intact, and every chip being just a little bit unique, like the original.