I was one of the young kids (age 15) who saved up and bought a TRS-80 in 1979. Apple IIe was definitely better, but more expensive. PET was a bit of an odd bi

I was one of the young kids (age 15) who saved up and bought a TRS-80 in 1979. Apple IIe was definitely better, but more expensive. PET was a bit of an odd bird, with chiclet square calculator keys and built in small monitor, no real keyboard. Apple II was the only one that was color, and if I recall it had bitmapped graphics with 256 x 192 resolution. TRS-80 had crude 48 x 128 graphics. My school had an Apple II for use by some science students, and I did some fooling around on it. It was definitely much nicer. But TRS-80 was mostly a tool to learn about computers; somehow I scrounged up resources (probably guided by magazines), got a CPU manual, and did some simple Z80 machine language programming, later got an assembler.