If only the C64's floppy drives weren't so unbearably slow! And they even had their own CPUs -- the Apple II may have had worse graphics and sound (to be fair it was designed five years before the C64), but its floppy drives were far faster than the C64's despite being "dumb" (but then they were designed by Steve Wozniak, a singular genius).

The price + graphics and sound (out-of-the-box) was what really made the difference for me and self-learning.

But I learned a lot more about disk data organization (hardware-level) via the Apple IIs that were at school.

An interesting side-note: a major factor in my family's decision to get me any computer at all was that I was staying after school almost everyday until usually 7pm.

Mom thought surely I must be lying about it and doing something else, probably nothing good.

She made a appointment to meet with the Computer teacher to ask him directly: he confirmed that I was there regularly, had keys for the computer room, and that maybe she should consider getting me my own machine for home.