The Commodore 64 was my path into LOOT, which started in early 1985.
I got the Commodore 64 in May 1984. I hoped to learn how to program
computers.

Unfortunately, my Dad decided I had to have a Commodore 64 instead of
some other kind of computer. He didn't know what he was talking
about, but liked to pretend he did. He reached his conclusion based
on the following facts. 1. It had 64K instead of 32K or 16K which
some other computers had. 2. It had a bit of a reputation for
business instead of games, especially as it was made by Commodore
Business Machines. 3. It had a "proper" keyboard, unlike the Sinclair
Spectrum rubber keyboard. 4. He once phoned a shop assistant who told
him that "The Commodore 64 was a better one than the Atari".

The true story was the Commodore 64 had only 38K RAM, the 64K
included ROM, but all other computer manufacturers were talking about
RAM. It wasn't used much in business, where the standard was becoming
the IBM PC. Word processing software was expensive and I never got
any. Atari computers used a more advanced dialect of BASIC.

After a few months of using the Commodore 64, I found out that its
version of the BASIC programming language was very old fashioned
compared to absolutely all other computers on the market at the time,
except (surprise surprise) the Commodore VIC-20. Later still, I found
out that this was because Commodore couldn't be bothered to write or
commission a new type of BASIC to make use of the Commodore 64
facilities. Their excuse or reason was to launch this computer on the
market before a competitor launched something similar. Some time
later, I even found out that they were using the same BASIC as on
some much older Commodore PET computers, which had no colour, no
graphics, and no sound, which may even have been unchanged since
1974! This was why the Commodore 64 had no commands for colour,
graphics, or sound. I planned to program some games, but I was
totally frustrated trying to program it to do anything except text
based programs, so I decided to sell it and convinced my Dad this was
the right course of action. My Dad was bedridden, dying of cancer and
was listening to the radio a lot. One of the radio programmes
featured a new paper just starting up called LOOT. The first issue
was published in March 1985. At the time, free advertising was a
revolutionary concept in Britain. We wrote an ad and advertised it in
LOOT, I think starting with the first edition. I'm not sure how long
it took to sell, complete with some books for about half the price we
paid, but I remember buying an Amstrad CPC664 in early May 1985,
after extensive research. Unfortunately, Amstrad discontinued this
model 4 or 5 months later for the CPC6128, but at least I was still
left with a BASIC written several years after Commodore 64 BASIC.