Wednesday, March 7, 1984, after school, or maybe it was March Break. Anyway, I finally made the big decision to drain my bank account, with all my life's saved allowance and the earnings from my first summer job, and buy my own computer. Obtaining careful directions from my mom to find the big Canadian Tire Store in Sault Ste. Marie, an hour's drive away, I set off to purchase it.
Recently, while rummaging in my old stuff in the attic, I came across the actual receipt.
What did I get for this money? A single-sided 5.25" floppy drive of the cheapest construction imaginable. A computer with 64KB of memory, capable of displaying 320x200 pixels on a 13" monitor.
Unlike the C64s my high school had gotten less than a year earlier, this one came with the special video cable that separated the chroma and luma components of the NTSC video, leading to a remarkably sharp video display, for the time. It was beautiful. I couldn't have been happier.
This was my only computer until I bought the secondhand Superbrain about three years later.
Oh yeah, and with the Canadian Tire Money that I got back, I bought a Wico Command Control joystick (the one with the red bat handle).