Sounds a lot like me. I was a bit older at the time, 'cause I bought my own, but I don't remember exactly how old. I had two sons by then, and the younger was old enough to learn Commodore BASIC. I remember it was built on a video interface chip, thus the name. I went from VIC-20 to a Commodore-64, then a Kaypro 4-84, which was a "portable," with two floppy drives, and ran on CP/M. I wrote two books on that thing, using WordStar. Finally I got an American PC with MS-DOS. I remember my first Windows being a DOS app.
It seemed to me that every real "system" in those days cost around $3,000, but as I graduated from system to system over the years, I kept getting more and more for that amount of money.
