It's interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, combined with the features that they chose to highlight. The First table clearly pitches the computer as

It's interesting to see with the benefit of hindsight, combined with the features that they chose to highlight. The First table clearly pitches the computer as a workhorse more than a game machine. When it came down to it, the thing that really mattered for most work cases was simply how much readable text can you display at once. Colour, and sound were nice, but couldn't compete with just the ability to show information. High end workstations of the era gave you decent resolution bitmapped displays long before they focused on colour. I was lucky enough to grow up in a household that had at various times TRS-80, a PET, CBM8032, VIC-20 and a C64 (plus others, the Casio fx9000P, was nice but I never had the tools to go beyond BASIC) . If you wanted a computer that could do a bit of everything the C64 was a good choice, If you wanted games, it was an excellent choice, but If you wanted to work, characters on screen was what you wanted.