[Anonymouse]

<slightly OT>
MTBF has indeed increased dramatically since then. However, I'd like to offer a corollary to that, viz. as equipment becomes more and more reliable, i.e. failures become less likely, the downside of this is that when it does fail, it tends to fail badly.
</slightly OT>

On the other hand, I liked having a computer which you could just switch on and immediately start using. Or, in the case of the Sharp MZ-700 I once had (Z80A CPU, excellent keyboard), you weren't limited to a single language, or even a given version - you could load any available language via a tape deck or microdisk, as it didn't have a BASIC ROM as, e.g. the VIC-20 did. It even had a built-in machine code monitor; with that plus Hisoft's Devpac (still the best assembler software I've ever had the pleasure of using), writing Z80 assembler was a) a doddle and b) a joy.

I miss the days when the user had almost total control over the computer...