What about your old neighbors?

[Keir]

Actually, I was the one with the VIC-20 while my friend next door had a 2600. I remember really wishing that Activision would make games for the VIC-20! But then we got a C64 and all was good...

[liveinabin]

I had a Sinclair ZX81 and my neighbour had a ZX Spectrum. I remember being insanely jealous that his machine had graphics, colour, sound and a keyboard with keys that actually pressed in.

I remember seeing Ghostbusters running on it. The (very poor) sampled speech on the title screen completely blew me away. I resolved to my mother to save up for one. They were £150. I got 50p every week. My mother soon saw the pointless futility of that and got me one

 

 

....then my friend got a Spectrum 128....then a C64....then an Amiga...

[Justin42]

I'm another person in the opposing group-- my best friend growing up had a 2600 and I had a 5200. The problem was the stupid controllers broke so often, and my parents didn't have a lot of money, so the 5200 was kind of off limits whenever anyone else was over! :/ (which I do totally understand, I saved up to buy the 5200 myself but my parents got stuck with the bill every time a controller broke.. I'm sure they were thrilled I think I lost track at 8 replaced controllers; sometimes they thankfully broke under warranty...) Still have that 5200, though, although it did get replaced by Atari in 1984 (I bought Berzerk and it fried the system!! Did anyone else ever have their 4-porter fried by Berzerk? I returned the game and wrote a sob story to Atari [it was way out of warranty] about 6 months later they replaced it for me with a brand new, in box, 2 port)

 

(Ok, so technically, I've had the same 5200 since 1984..)

 

But we played a ton of 2600 at his house-- he didn't have a ton of games, and they were mostly older ones, but we played a ton of Baseball (the old, really bad one!), Missile Command, Raiders of the Lost Ark (I never did figure that game out..).. I vaguely remember him getting Donkey Kong just before he changed schools and we kind of lost touch.

 

One of my dad's co-workers had a Colecovision (he had sons a bit younger than I was at the time). I really, really wanted one (Turbo was my favourite arcade game at the time) but I think the sales guy at Gemco (remember those on the west coast?) talked us into the 5200 because it had a better arcade lineup overall. I think my parents were scared of the cost of the expansion modules, too... Heh, that one sales guy probably had a pretty major impact on my life, since I ended up with an 800XL a couple years later, 130XE, 1040ST, etc, etc..

[gulag picture radio]

That brings up an interesting point. I really miss having a place to go where you can depend on a regular salesman. When I was a kid, my folks got all of our appliances (radios, TV's, VCR, etc.) from a locally owned store a few blocks away. We had a regular salesman there and he took really good care of my folks, and even me when I was in college and bought a few things before they closed up.

 

I'm not rising to the defense of your commision-vulture type salesman, but the guys who were lifers who would actually look after you if you were a repeat customer. While they may have had some ethical reason to do so (heh), simple capitalism worked in the consumer's favor - if you weren't happy, you weren't coming back, and negative word would get around, etc.

 

With this guy "Charlie" I always knew that whatever I bought would be high quality and with a good track record. For some reason they were really into Toshiba over there, though as goofy as that sounds pretty much all the Toshiba stuff we bought there 20 years ago still works. Once they closed up, there was little choice but to go to Best Buy etc. where the guys who work there lack training (or just don't care) about customer welfare.

 

I was really happy when I found a family owned chain called "Douglas TV" a couple of years ago. I bought a whole bunch of stuff there, could bring repairs in (they had great prices), and even had a regular salesman named "Lefty". Sadly, they also got bought out by a chain, their store demolished and made into condos. Now I just buy everything online. If I'm going to get crap service, I may as well pay a little less for it.

 

"Douglas TV" getting demolished is a double shame because 1) I didn't know about it and they still had a LaserActive system on display that I could have gotten for a song... and 2) there was actually a little bowling alley upstairs from them (you could actually hear strikes in the TV showroom), and there were some pretty funny hardened alcoholics who hung out there.

[NovaXpress]

In these days, with all the information you need just a Google search away, why would anyone listen a salesperson's opinions? Even 30 years ago most salesmen were full of shit and just trying to rip people off. Now that we can do our own research, why would we be foolish enough to trust a person who's job depends on making money off of us?

[gulag picture radio]

You're certainly right about that. The web is just so staggeringly cool at letting anyone become an informed consumer. I especially like sites like epinions and even Amazon that let you read user reviews so you have some inkling of what the product is actually like.

 

It's a shame that this level of access is all so recent. There was little choice other than to trust your salesman, or do a ton of legwork on your own (I chose the legwork approach myself).

 

I guess that's why I made the distinction between a "lifer" and just a regular salesman. I don't mean a lifetime salesman who flits from product to product - to paraphrase Nolan Bushnell, those guys don't care if they're selling video games or ketchup.

 

What I mean is a guy who's been at a particular business for a long time. Charlie, the salesman that I mentioned in my post, had been at that store for 30+ years. Of course he wants to make money, but he needs to protect himself from selling really nasty crap because he's not going to get future sales. That's your capitalist ideal at work there - since retail has to guard their own profits and future existence, it behooves them to provide better products.

 

Of course there's really no corollary today since big box stores have created an environment where a regular person can't buy a VCR anywhere else. There's really no distinction between these stores (how different is Circuit City from Best Buy, from Frye's, from Target etc.? hint: one also sells Ho-Ho's ) employees have no motivation to do an especially good job, and there's no chance to build a relationship with a customer.

 

Hmmm. I've suddenly made myself really sad. I miss Charlie.

[Dino from Bula]

"Douglas TV" sounds like the old Anderson's Furniture Store in lovely Ashtabula, Ohio. It was there that I played a Bally Professional Arcade. Space Zap was my favorite game at the time, and, boy, what a port Bally had (duh, since it was their game). The Wizard of Wor port was amazing, too.

 

Anyway, it was the place you went for that system. Wanted Intellivision or O2? You went to Mace Electronics. Atari? You went wherever. Missile Command came from Hills, Asteroids was straight outta Kmart, Pitfall was Dahlkemper's. Point is, people knew the "off" systems when the stores specialized in a niche market.

 

All your points are great.