The first computer I ever used was called the Vic-20.
This was before the internet existed in any real sense that would be recognizable today.
To telephone someone you used a rotary dial.
To drink a soda (like a Tab or a Shasta) you had to first peel off the pop tab.
To play music you had to put a needle on a spinning disc.
Things were different then.
I lived in a group home at the time, one day I met this girl at school and I started walking her home. I, clad in tube socks and cut-offs, would even carry her violin.
The girl I would walk home had a Vic-20 computer.
I liked her…
Vic-20.
I would go to her house everyday and we would talk for hours, if “talking for hours” means “I used her Vic-20 while she read Jack London novels”.
She had “Mole Attack” and “SeaWolf”.
Her father had what could only be described as an insane amount of reference books for computing. I read them all.
To set up a Vic-20 required a screwdriver.
You hooked it up to the UHF screws on the back of your TV. There was a switch and with that switch you could go from TV to Computer land.
Computer land was a nice place for me, the boys in my group home could be mean at times. Let’s just say they didn’t know what an infinite loop was.
The more time I could spend with her…
Vic-20, the better.
She would kiss me sometimes beneath her Benji poster, but I figured this was a small price to pay for computer time (ends up I was wrong about that – women are only attractive to me now if they wear frumpy sweaters and thick glasses).
When you flipped that switch from TV to Computer, you saw a display that would wow anyone…
Are you ready to enter a dream world of magic?
I was amazed by what I could make occur. For example, if I wanted to have the word “hello” show up on the computer screen, all I had to do was program this…
10 PRINT “{SHIFT+CLRSCRN}”
20 PRINT “HELLO”
30 END
Like magic, the word “hello” would appear on the screen, because I, Godlike, had decreed it to be.
Things were so simple, If I wanted to move the cursor all I had to do was use the cursor keys…
You could do anything!
I remember when her Dad told me he had bought something I would like. He had a smile on his face.
I was kinda nervous until he revealed what he had bought…
What am I, a king?
Who on earth could use so much memory?
Okay, back to modern life… I recently saw an ad for a Vic 20 from 1982 and I would like to highlight the selling features of the Vic 20. The ad listed 26 reasons to buy a Vic-20.
Including…
Reason No. 2…
25 K, baby. What you gonna say bout that?
Reason No.3…
This monster can go up to 27 and 1/2 k Ram.
Reason No.11…
This one is a crazy cool…
U to the L. This puppy has the ability to show both upper and lower case letters.
Want some Specs?
That aint all…
This thing roars like a lion
I just turned 40 years old.
I am very happy I met that girl.
She had a lovely Vic-20, and a name.
I don’t remember her name, but her Vic-20 rocked.
People are even still buying and selling these on Ebay!
Need a thirty year old computer to relive your childhood? Here are Vic-20 items on Ebay right now (hilarious, and how my walk down memory lane started in the first place)…
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{ 17 comments… read them below or add one }
I had the same kind of love for my Amiga 500.
One of earth’s biggest mysteries (at least for me) is how Commodore managed to screw up everything…
Heh, I started out with a Commodore Plus/4 (shudder), moved my way up to a 64c and then to two Amiga 500’s (busted the first one trying hack the mobo to get 1MB of chip RAM). I was such a Commodore “fanboi” back then it was ridiculous. Ironically I use a Mac at home now and love it. Sigh…what might have been…
Oh wow, I had forgotten about Mole Attack. I had a Vic20 when I was 7, I played this game like crazy. Thanks for bringing back the memories.
Choplifter, Baby…. Oh yeah!
Oh that takes me back. I started out with a Texas Instruments TI99/4A. Metal plated with a full sized keyboard and a 16-bit processor. I still remember my birthday when my parents bought me the Extended Basic cartridge and I could suddenly have sprites wafting about the screen. They couldn’t drag me off the machine to get me to go to school!
I went on to have a BBC Model B (32K), then a BBC Master (128K) until I finally reached the nirvana of the Amiga 500. Using a mouse for the first time made my brain bend…
Had a Vic20. Replaced it with a C64. Ahh, memories of many nights spent typing in pages of code from magazines to get a few sprites a jumping. It’s amazing they could run on that k of ram.
Dude – that DOES bring back the memories! The Vic 20 was my ‘first’ too. My parents eventually bought a TV to put in my room – they were tired of not being able to watch their TV shows… It took me two weeks to get my first game to work, and a couple of months to figure out machine language (POKE – jeez, I type in a lot of stuff). And I hated that tape drive – never really could get it to work (which is probably why I am an infrastructure guy, and not a programmer).
The Vic-20 was alo my first computer. I remember Radar Rat Race and Omega Race were my favorites. I think I only bought 1 game that was stored on tape, verything else I bought was on cartriges. I later upgraded to an Amiga 1000 (I’m always an early adopter!) and then I too had found computing nirvana. CBM really srewed the pooch. They were way ahead of Mac in 1985 and blew it.
Thanks for this trip down memory lane. A VIC-20 was the first computer my family owned. I didn’t have a tape drive at first and had to keep it powered up to keep my code in memory.
Prior to that, a friend had a TRS-80 model 1 that we would play on. Another kid had a Apple ][. Between them all, I was in computing heaven.
That is a seriously awesome trip down memory lane! I remember typing programs from COMPUTE! and then having to leave the damn machine on for days because I didn’t have a disk to save them on. And when I got my first floppy drive, I was the Lord of the Bits because I could save and restore my programs on 8 friggin K of disk!
Love it! Thanks for the memories.
The basic code you posted would work on many other 8bit systems of the time… but not the Vic-20. The Vic-20 didn’t have a CLS basic instruction. Instead you had to print a special character (SHIFT+HOME/CLRSCRN).
Really you would want:
10 PRINT “{SHIFT+CLRSCRN}”
20 PRINT “HELLO”
Any ways, I am sure its been a while since you wrote basic on the Vic.
@Dave C oops. you are right. It has indeed been awhile. I just wanted to illustrate that you used to have t order “print” to make text show up on a screen
Meh. No flash and no camera. It’ll never sell.
In those days, I also went up to a girl’s bedroom so I could use her… Plus/4. It was exciting because I had different equipment than her. Mine was a C64. Hers had built-in applications. I don’t think she got as much out of it as me and I wasn’t invited back.
Wow, cool article. Even now, I have MESS loaded on my home computer so that I can load up a Vic-20 or C=64 emulator. You can download MESS, which means Multiple Emulator Super System, for free, from here:
http://www.mess.org/
Then you have to find the machine ROMs which you can find here:
http://darkside.rommanager.com/misc.html
or many other places on the web. I think the latest version of the ROMS is .031. Anyway, it’s not quite as good as the old Vic20, but it’s still fine.
Oh, Remember L shift O
After years of TRS-80 first love, I dated a girl whose dad had a Commodore 64. So I bought one and traded software with him for years. Good times.
My wife, Lori, forwarded this to me. She’s the brains behind Montessori for Everyone. Back in the day my family ’splurged’ and got me the C64 over the Vic20. It lasted until 1991 when I met the Amiga 500.
BTW, if curious Ars Technica did an exhaustive story on the rise and fall of Commodore. http://arstechnica.com/hardware/news/2007/07/a-history-of-the-amiga-part-1.ars