I was originally going to get the TRS-80 Color Computer(32 columns, all caps). I spent the summer of 81 working at grandma's to save up money for the computer. My parents were going to pay for the other half and I'd get it for Christmas. One day grandma wanted to see this "new fangled thing" that I wanted, so we went to a Radio Shack. The CoCo display was turned off so I asked the guy working there if he would turn it on - his response "I can't, there's a password for it and I don't know it. If it's not typed in correctly it will ruin the computer". Needless to say, the bold faced lie really ticked me off, and to this date I purchase a lot fewer things from Rat Shack than I would have.
I then found out about the newly released Vic 20 and decided to get that instead. Turned out to be a much better system for me as I'd taught myself programming on a Commodore PET my freshman year in highschool(80-81). I think the funky editing on the CoCo would have annoyed me to no end.
I got my first modem around the time I started to learn machine language. I didn't even have an assembler, I used a short BASIC program with data statements and a READ/POKE loop(took me a bit to figure out backward branching). One of my early ML programs was a 40 column terminal, using 4 pixel wide characters(each character was 3 pixels wide with 1 pixel for spacing between letters). It worked surprisingly well(probably because the pixels were so large, somebody did something similiar for the C=64 later but it didn't work quite as well). The only annoying thing was my screen scrolling routine - it went by column(left to right) and made the display look like it was doing the hula while it scrolled :-)