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?
I got one in late 1982 or early 1983 when the price dropped a little bit (I think I paid under $100). I got it from the department store that my high school girlfriend was working at the time. It was definitely an early 9VAC unit, not the later one with the DIN power connector. I already had a PET (2001N-32) and a C-64 and 1541 so I was able to immediately use the 1541 with it. I typed in a few games from magazines/books and I wrote some programs to play with the sound and color a bit (exploring the differences between the VIC-I and VIC-II chips). I also did a little hardware hacking because the expansion connector was standard 22-pin edge connector and, of course, the User Port connector had a lot of overlap with the pinouts of the PET and C-64. The most elaborate thing I made was a DEC FlipChip module tester by wiring a 6821 to the expansion bus and to a single DEC backplane connector. I did some small software exploration of that device but never worked out the massive wad of vector tables one would need to make it really useful.
Contrasting that, is there anyone here who actually got their hands on an IBM 5150 within that first year?
I got my first job in March, 1982, at Bruce and James/Software Labs (two companies, same owners, one public-facing, one a captive development resource for the public-facing company). Their flagship product was "WordVision", a word processor for "PC-DOS 1.0 or higher, 256K required, at least 1 floppy drive required". My job was writing the demo for the never-produced C-64 "home version" of WordVision. We had 2-3 5150s at work that Spring/Summer. I didn't do a lot on them, but I did use them occasionally. I didn't form a very favorable opinion of them from my experience. All of the flaws and limitations stood out to me, and there wasn't much software at the time that really leveraged any of the positives (like way more RAM than a typical home computer of the day). My opinion was if you were going to spend that much, just get a loaded Apple II. One thing stuck with me from that job was when the boss kept saying "wait until the 'Peanut' (PCjr) comes out. It's going to change the world!" At the time, the 5150 was so expensive that it wasn't expected to make many inroads into the home market (which is why we were planning a C-64 version of the product), so IBM's home offering was going to clear the decks at that tier while maintaining dominance in the office. But then the clones happened... -ethan