Old Civics and Integras trade around their original MSRP. Is Fiat 500 Gardiniera an exotic? Those are 15-20K Euro right now for a car you will spend 10 minutes in once a year for memes. Investment market is totally screwed, even real estate stopped being safe, people with money collect whatever now while Fed printers go BRrrrr.
Well, that's disappointing to know.
GEOS and maybe two floppy copy programs being the only things that actually used that ram, and Geos wasnt really something anyone really wanted to use beyond 'hey thats neat' phase. Doing things in GEOS was a study in patience.
What I remember was that I could type in a word processor (of sorts) and the font on the screen looked like the font that was printed on my Panasonic dot matrix printer. And to ME, that was amazing because before I had my Commodore, I used a typewriter ... and not a fancy electric one either ... it had a carriage return handle on it that I had to pull in order to get to the next line on the page.
I'll never forget the time when I took the head apart on that dot matrix printer because I wanted to know how it worked. What I didn't know when I did that, was that there was some special machining that went into the assembly of those heads ... that printer never worked again and it took me months to save up for a new one. lol
GEOS also introduced me to spreadsheets ... which I had no knowledge of nor experience with before then. Also graphical file browsing on the floppy ... I can't remember though if drag and drop was part of GEOS ... I'm thinking probably not but then again Apple did have drag and drop back then I think when the first Machintosh was introduced so maybe it did.
Remember Aldus Pagemaker? Boy they owned the market in their space for several years in the mid to late 80s.
C128 had two independent graphics chips, the "new" 80 column one scrounged from a waste bin of another failed Commodore project and only able to work with RGBI (CGA) monitors. No sprites, text mode only. Once you count the cost of CGA monitor and FDD you already paid more than brand new Amiga/ST, or used XT.
Biggest scam was C128D, two graphic chips and 3 build in CPUs for the low low price of Amiga 500/ST. Some Commodore employee even said C128D cost more to manufacture than Amiga 500. Insanity.
Well, as I mentioned in another response, I did download a schematic from Compuserve one time that was literally made with ASCII characters (think ASCII art, only with a schematic), and it showed me how to add a second SID chip to my C=128 so that I could have true stereo sound (three voices in the left speaker and three in the right). A local Commodore shop was able to order the SID chip for me and I got other parts like capacitors and I can't remember what else from Radio shack, and one night I ripped that thing apart and I think I either piggybacked the SID chip onto the main one or I glued it down somewhere and used bus wire to solder the connections of the added chip to the existing one. That was 1986 and I was 16 years old so the details escape me, but I do remember starting around 9pm and not finishing until around 3am. There were programs that you could download from Compuserve and even some BBSes that could take advantage of the second chip, but the only way I used it was with these true stereo MIDI files that people posted to Compuserve ... movie theme music and popular hit songs that someone converted into 6 voice midi format with a synthesizer no doubt and I could load those music files into a special player and sit back and hear true stereo sound from my 128. The theme music to Beverly Hills Cop for example started out with the keyboards playing that melody and between the left and the right channel, there was about a 15 millisecond offset with an echo so that the sound bounced between the speakers and added depth to it and the MIDI file re-produced that perfectly. I was impressed with it and loved that I was able to make the computer do something that it was never designed to do and certainly something that few people would even bother doing.
Dead operating system from the 70ties. Why would you want to do that on a home computer?
C128 sounded and was marketed as C64 with 2x improvements, when in reality it was a basket case of old parts Commodore wanted to get rid of. Failed graphic chip here, obsolete Z80 processor there, sprinkle some old ram, double the price.
CP/M was my first exposure to a DOS style operating system. I do remember spending a lot of time trying to find something useful to do with it, but ultimately giving up. I didn't get my first PC until I was 22 years old and I traded my Amiga with attached 20 meg hard drive for the PC because obviously by 1993, the trend towards PCs was in full force so I knew I needed to get on that bandwagon. By the time I was 25 I was already a network engineer and I've had a good career ever since.