I had a VIC back then. (I know I told this story before, but here it is again.) It was a gift from my sister who worked at Commodore at the time (she worked in sales under Kit Spencer, and often worked with Mike Tomczyk and Jack Tramiel). I used to think she got my computer with her employee discount, but it was more like the employee-walk-out-the-door-with-whatever-you-want discount (Bil Herd recently confirmed this was a thing that was done with approval). I only had a tape drive and maybe one cartridge (no floppy drive). I wrote several games in BASIC, plus other programs to do useful things. A few years ago, I found many of my programs on an old cassette tape, and yes, I transferred them to floppy. One game I am currently re-developing for the C64. I spent many hours programming on my VIC. I also built a couple simple circuits to interface with it. The 22 column screen was a challenge, but it forced you to be creative. Plus I didn't have a RAM expansion, so working within 3.5k was another challenge, a barrier that I slammed up against on one particular program. It was fun learning all the memory optimization techniques. I was spoiled in school in 8th, 9th, and 12th grades where I got to use TRS-80 Models 1 and III (taught myself BASIN on them before I got the VIC), but the VIC was all mine, and that made it better! Chris On Fri, Aug 13, 2021 at 9:34 AM Alexander Pierson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
February '81, eh? Did anyone else have a VIC-20 when it was relatively new? What was your experience like?
Contrasting that, is there anyone here who actually got their hands on an IBM 5150 within that first year?
I find the VIC gets a bit of an unfair shake these days, seen as an underpowered toy/game system. However, I see it as the little machine that could. The VIC-20 is my favorite vintage computer, hands down. Don't believe me? http://commodorez.com/img/vicportrait1000.jpg
-Alexander 'Z' Pierson _ On Thursday, August 12, 2021, 4:56:59 PM EDT, Richard Cini < rich.cini@gmail.com> wrote:
I got my VIC in February 1981 (9th grade). Upgraded to a Fat Mac in 1985. I didn’t get anything PC-ish until I was half-way through college (a DeskPro 386/16 with 5 MB of RAM and a 42mb hard drive; still have that machine too). My point was more that 40 years is a long time.
On Thu, Aug 12, 2021 at 4:50 PM Alexander Pierson via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
I think I was still using my VIC-20 then.
You make it sound like it was old in '81, however: Happy 40th birthday Commodore VIC-20 too. Yes, technically it was released in Japan in '80, but nobody here lived in Japan/had a VIC-1001. I've never heard a concrete, verifiable answer on what month it was released in the US. Just vaguely mid-summer.
-Alexander 'Z' Pierson _ On Thursday, August 12, 2021, 7:45:02 AM EDT, Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic <vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
August 12, 1981 at a news conference in NY, IBM introduced the PC. 40 years ago. Holy cow. I think I was still using my VIC-20 then.
Rich
http://cini.classiccmp.org/ Long Island S100 User’s Group
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