My brother and his best friend were huge Commodore junkies in the early 80's and they both worked at Radio Shack and they traded disks back and forth, and I pretty much grew up on the thing, we started with a breadbin C64 and datasette in 83, then we moved up to the 128 and 1581 around 86.
I remember we tinkered with the Atari 800 and the old Apple computers, while we all liked messing around with the Commodore and Atari stuff, the Apples were always failing, we rammed foam between the pcbs and left the cover off to keep it going and it STILL overheated.