For the first round of keyboard (not solder your own) pc's the ziglog processors rocked. And since Radio Shack was close by all the Tandy series are close to my heart. The RS managers let us kids play on the demo models for so long! I think it sold many computers in the end and word of mouth spread. The early Apples were expensive even at the beginning of the home computer revolution.
I don't consider anything that did not a keyboard, long term storage, and an actual text monitor to be of much real use for the home user.
My friends dad had a model I can't remember the model that had toggle switches and blinking lights that we played around with. We could program it through basic math and a few commands and make the lights put on a light show. It took many hours and was not really that entertaining, plus beyond the 256 bytes?, turn it off and you would start over. But it was fun enough to make me want more.
My first home computer I sold my "trials" bike motorcycle for when I was a pre-teen. I made a few bucks off that and waited until the 16K COCO came out. My friend group all bought COCOs and we eventually participated in a local COCO older man computer group...
I still have my original COCO. I would bet $100 it would still work out of storage today - Think I paid $399 for it without power off storage. Not so sure about the single sided 35 track single sided 5 1/4 disk drives or any of the disks....
I had this computer for two weeks before I could afford the 1500 baud (bits per second) cassette tape storage - high end modems at the time were just starting to become affordable at 300 baud (double 150!!!! yah!!!) . I did not have disk based storage for another two years. I got really good at using the built in cassette tape spinning counter to find the gaps to determine data or the next program.
I am a horder and still have probably 4 CoCos, ver 1,2,3.... My COCO 1 was the best overclock-able CPU I have ever had. It was stable at 2 times the original 0.79 hgz.... Loved its 8k basic and the additional 8 k extended basic and the additional 8k Disk extended basic and one of the original easter eggs in I think the COCO 3? with a black and white microsoft build team image burned into the ROM....
I also had close neighborhood friends with the Commodore vic-20 and the 64. So powerful with their graphic capabilities, but they could not program them as well as the COCO....
I also had an "Amber" screen 8086. The green screens were too common.... It worked but was too business like and was late to the game with color and decent games. Plus the 8088 and the 8086 where actually slow. Low IPC.
I loved my Amigas that I felt continued the true computer pioneering spirit (that I struggled to afford) that I loved. The 800, 1000, and Falcon where so powerful. I sold all these for some reason... Too many 3 1/2" disks... The Falcon was sooo cool and had such an audio following at the time. A lot of video was done in the pro market during this time on Amigas, toasters, and higher end machines.
I'll end sadly with business machines (IBMs?) will probably always dominate the dollars and numbers.... And in my opinion the lessor technologies win if you can make the better business case and dominate the market. I think "Business" often means less flash, simpler, reliable, boring, and flashy glossy fliers, and in the past probably golf... Maybe more Gates and less Woznack. Jobs was probably more Gates / Allen than a true computer geek!
I do love how UNIX is still the basis for much of the current computer world!