> The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive.
Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).
> My friends who had one just played games.
Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!
Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).
> My friends who had one just played games.
Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!