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Having learnt on a Commodore, I have to agree that the immediacy of the basic language and the friendly 'ready.' prompt is a great way to start with computers. Although I didn't spend a lot of time on BASIC - I spent much more time in assembly language, which was much more fun anyway. But it was accessible, and definitely helped kick it off. Now i've got a computer many orders of magnitude faster and more complex yet it takes 100x longer to 'boot', and even that's to something no-where near as friendly as a nice 'i'm ready for you' message - its more likely to be demanding something of me that I couldn't care less about.
No need to buy a real machine either - try searching the net for 'VICE', or similar programs - complete and excellent Commodore emulators that even manage to run about real-time on most modern computers. And you get to avoid all the pain of an overheating disk drive and corrupt files, or fuzzy tv text.
