Sure you could do real work on them (even I had a copy of GEOS), but by and large the C64/A500 were marketed as game machines, and were often scoffed at in the computing world because of that. The software sections at all the major chains, toy stores, etc, were filled with games, and comparatively little productivity. Walk into a mall Software Etc, and you'd see an A500 running a game demo. At least up until the mid-late 80's, people who had the money and considered the computer primarily as a tool bought IBMs (which had better suited displays for that anyway), or maybe an Apple.
