Yes I had that one. It was the worst decision of my life. Had I waited 6 months or so, the Amiga 500 would have launched. I got stuck on dead hardware and got hooked off from computers for several years.
If it is any consolation, I got started on the Radio Shack Color Computer ecosystem, with the original version the the CoCo3. Back then, there was quite a bit of debate by the mid 1980's about the longevity of 8/16-bit processors like the 6809 and the 6502 / 6510 series.
Addressing a maximum of 64KiB of memory back when 4KiB was expensive seemed fine. And due to cost, picking an 8-bit processor for a design in 1980 seemed sensible. But the ability to support up to 1MiB of RAM (eventually) on the 8086 series help insure the platform's longevity, in spite of the horrible segmented memory programming model.
Companies like Motorola weren't terribly interested in backwards compatibility, preferring instead to design completely new instruction sets (like the 68K family) for their 32-bit platforms.
Same here. Trying to type anything on that thing (especially copying the code out of magazines) was just horrible.
Edit: just remembered something that made it even worse than just the awful keys - all reserved words for BASIC were tokenized in some way where you had to use a control-key sequence to tell it PRINT, for instance, instead of being able to type P,R,I,N,T <enter>.
