Thanks for interesting post, and for the point it raises. The Austrian police force has called upon the retro-hacking community to help them extract any meaningfull information from the C64, so to all C64 into-coding nerds out there, now's your time to shine!!
Seriously, I have been using an A500+ with a 2Mb expansion and three (3!) Floppy drives (but no hard disk) right before the advent of Windows 95. I used it for my A-Level project, to write numerous programs, doodle in Dpaint, wordprocessing (Worthworth, slow as hell but good) and spreadsheets (something made by Oxxi, can't remember the name)
Then, I went on holiday to London, intending to buy a big-box Amiga there. While strolling through Oxford street, I saw an all singing all dancing PC at NESS (now defunct). Surprisingly, the price was less then half of what the Amiga would cost, and the specificatons were far superior. After toying with the machine at the shop for ages (I remember I was dressed shabbily and the salesperson was getting quite nervous) I took the plunge, and 8 long years had to pass before I bought another Amiga computer.
Sad but true (sob)
Cheerio
