What did the Commodore Vic 20 (or contemporaries) do?

[Sampiro]

I was watching a Commodore Vic 20 commercial and was curious: what could you do with one? On the commercial they play arcade "Space Invaders" like games. Did it do word processing? And if so, did it have any internal memory or did everything have to be put on a disk? What was probably the most complex feature it had?

Just curious. I was alive and a teenager then but never used a computer until much later. Chime ins on its contemporaries are also welcome.

[RealityChuck]

They had 20K of memory, which was a lot back then. You could do word processing (saving your files on cassette tapes).

[Gangster Octopus]

I'm pretty sure you could program it to say "Hello, World!"

[Athena]

Originally Posted by RealityChuck

They had 20K of memory, which was a lot back then. You could do word processing (saving your files on cassette tapes).

Maybe total. RAM was only around 5k or so.

My first computer was a Vic 20, and as I recall, the answer to the OP is 'not much'. I played games , and typed more games in. Storage was via cassette tape, though I think a floppy drive was available.

There was a word processor, but it cost extra, and was very, very low featured. I seem to remember something like a max of 4 pages or something.

[pulykamell]

Originally Posted by RealityChuck

They had 20K of memory, which was a lot back then. You could do word processing (saving your files on cassette tapes).

No it didn't. It had 5K of RAM (without any expansion), and only about 3.5K was available to the user once it booted up. That was my first computer.

[pulykamell]

Originally Posted by Gangster Octopus

I'm pretty sure you could program it to say "Hello, World!"

10 PRINT "HELLO, WORLD!"

or, for those who like the shortcuts:

10 ? "HELLO, WORLD!"

Of course, these sorts of basic programs pretty much required the follow-up line:

20 GOTO 10

[Jophiel]

Here's an old magazine article about some software available for the Vic-20, Commodore 64 and other contemporaries. You kind of have to scroll around because the opening of the article and the page I linked to are separated by a retro-riffic advertising section.

The C=64 was considerably more powerful but the Vic-20 itself has a word processor (Type Write) that holds 3-5 pages of text, a data manager (Rabbit Base) that holds 600 records and a spreadsheet (Praticalc).

[obfusciatrist]

I remember playing some games on it. And the joy of tape storage. And typing BASIC programs out of magazines which was mostly an exercise in discovering that I wasn't very good at typing.

[Sampiro]

What kind of printer was available? Would it print on white paper or just that (sorry, can't remember the name of it though I used enough- the kind with the holes on a perforated strip on each side that you tore off).

[johnpost]

it had serial interface to peripherals so a number could be easily connected.

[johnpost]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

What kind of printer was available? Would it print on white paper or just that (sorry, can't remember the name of it though I used enough- the kind with the holes on a perforated strip on each side that you tore off).

i think every home computer printer of that era was tractor feed or roll feed. plain white tractor feed paper with sheet perforations was available.

[Dewey Finn]

You're thinking of a continuous feed, dot-matrix printer. You could use those. My freshman year of college, I had a Commodore 64, while my roommate had an Atari 800 computer. I only had a 300 baud modem, while he had a wicked fast 1200 baud modem. It was so fast that the text scrolled off the screen faster than you could read it. And his printer was a typewriter with a daisy wheel to make the characters. It connected to his computer and could print his papers much nicer looking than the dot matrix printers everyone else used. But it made a horrible racket when it printed.

[Jophiel]

Here's some game screen shots (off an emulator) that give a decent idea of what the graphics were like. Games were mainly simple shoot-em-ups and side scrollers.

[Voyager]

My father-in-law had one. I taught him how to program in Basic when he was 65, and he used it to implement some ideas he had about anticipating moves in the commodities market. He had been a commodities broker after he retired from teaching, so it wasn't as wacky as it sounds.

He moved to a portable TRS-80 which had more power. I'm pretty.sure Commodore sold a printer for it - I had one from my C64.
You can do a surprisingly large number of things with a tiny bit of memory, if you are careful.

[An Gadaí]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

What kind of printer was available? Would it print on white paper or just that (sorry, can't remember the name of it though I used enough- the kind with the holes on a perforated strip on each side that you tore off).

Its competitor had this kind.

[Anamorphic]

We had a Vic-20. I was pretty young, but I remember a few things about it. Mostly playing primitive games on it, and, as has already been mentioned, typing in BASIC games from magazines. I remember one in particular - it was a ripoff of the arcade game Crazy Climber. Hours of fun! After you got it to load from the cassette machine, that is.

I also remember a few of the cartridge games we bought for it. A few text adventure games by Scott Adams, and a clone of the arcade game Rally-X called Radar Rat Race.

I also remember my dad doing the family's finances on a spreadsheet, so I guess those must have existed back then.

[Shagnasty]

The Commodore 64 was the older brother of the Vic-20 and much more capable and popular. Millions were sold. You could do many things you can do on a current computer except for fancy multimedia in a very primitive way. It had a cartridge slot so you could buy games but you could also type in your own programs from magazines or write them yourself. The Commodore 64 was a little ahead of its time in the way you could write sound and simple graphics through the built in version of BASIC it had. There were word processing programs and printers available as well as some simple office software. The floppy disk drive wasn't included and cost about the same as the computer itself but the whole package was about $700 between the two which was revolutionary at the time and much cheaper than the competitors like the Apple IIE. The sheer numbers sold meant that there was a large amount of commercial software that was developed for it over a few years in the early 1980's.

You could also connect to the early incarnations of the internet with it if you bought a (very slow) modem. Compuserve and AOL plus the bulletin board services offered connectivity at a (steep) price usually billed by the hour.

There is still a hobbyist movement for new Commodore 64 software and a web browser for it as well as at least one Commodore 64 web server. They were cool computers and you can run it as an emulator on a computer today to play around with it like I do.

[An Gadaí]

Originally Posted by Shagnasty

The Commodore 64 was the older brother of the Vic-20 and much more capable and popular.

Younger surely? Vic-20 came out a couple of years before the C64. C64 had a really long life, my friends were buying games for theirs in the early 1990s.

[twickster]

Moved Cafe Society --> GQ.

[kunilou]

I had an Atari 400, which came out at the same time. The games came on cartridges. I had a word processor, which also came on a cartridge, and some other programs (I remember a checkbook registry), which came on cassette tapes. The printer was more like a typewriter. It used regular paper, but I could actually type faster than the printer could.

did it have any internal memory or did everything have to be put on a disk?

You ARE young, aren't you? You saved everything on a cassette drive. It took several minutes to save anything, and much longer to load it back in.

[Derleth]

You could do a number of the same things you can do with a modern computer, only a hell of a lot smaller to fit in the RAM constraints. RAM is Random Access Memory. It's the computer's 'scratchpad storage' that is faster than going out to disk or (especially) tape but gets erased every time the computer is turned off. For permanent storage in the home computers of that era you had either big floppy disks or audio cassette tapes.

The tiny amount of RAM really dictated much of what you could do with the system: It had pretty lousy graphics because you need RAM to draw the next video frame in, and with so little RAM you can't fit a lot of detail in. Software has to use RAM for both itself and all of its calculations, meaning that you either create a small, simple program that fits entirely in RAM or you find a way to partition a larger program so it can run with only a section of it in RAM at a time. The sound was primitive partially because the sound hardware was primitive, but also because (you guessed it) you had to fit everything you needed to generate the audio in the same tiny amount of RAM you were using for everything else.

In addition, the processor that actually executed the C64's software was a lot slower than modern processors. I mean, three full orders of magnitude slower: It ran at right around a million instructions per second, whereas modern processors are running at around a billion instructions per second. It's possible to get clever with software and write responsive applications anyway, but you can't hide a difference that big.

Aside from all that, it was a general-purpose computer that could be programmed to do a huge variety of things, and was: In its era, it was a hugely popular system and found its way into homes, hobbyist shacks, businesses, schools, and, most likely, industrial applications as well.

[minor7flat5]

In Spring of '81, my mom gave me a Vic-20 in exchange for a promise to silence my ham radio—the neighbors had been complaining about the broad black bands my transmitter caused on their television.

I didn't have any games or cartridges with it, but I did have a good time writing BASIC programs, and even getting started in 6502 machine code. I still remember "A9" meant "LDA" (Load the Accumulator) and "8D" meant "STA" (Store the Accumulator).
What a great little machine for a kid to learn to program on.

I would type in those BASIC or machine code programs from the magazines and try to figure out how they did what they did. Usually, the machine code ones were two pages of comma-separated numbers, with little hope of ever finding a mistake should you make one.

Some time later, my folks gave me an 8K expansion cartridge, and cartridge called a "super expander".

The super expander added another 3.5K or so to the computer, but its real claim to fame was that it provided a very primitive library for programming graphics. In other words, you could do things like draw lines from point x,y to x',y'

You couldn't use the cartridges together.

But...
There were always neat hacks in the Commodore magazines, I tried several of them.

The cartridge port was actually a bus kind of interface, so I was able to solder together four edge connecters in parallel and make a "four cartridge extender"

Then I learned that inside the 8K cartridge case was a set of dip switches that allowed you to choose the memory block where the 8K started. I cut a small hole in the case to access these switches.

At that point, I finally found out what use that cartridge was: there was a little machine language app that a friend gave me that would rip the ROM program code from a game cartridge and serialize it to a cassette tape. You could then plug in the 8K expander, set to the correct memory location, and use the same little program to load the cartridge code into the 8K RAM.

A couple of hard switches added to the case, wired to pins on the mother board, finished the package: one for hard reset, the other for soft reset.

After loading the game object code, hit the reset switch and the game would boot.

And no, this wasn't the way the games were meant to work—they were cartridge games, just like for a Nintendo system.

[kenobi 65]

I had a class in high school (1982-1983) on computer programming. We were using Radio Shack TRS-80s. Among the programs we had to write was one which would slowly "print" Robert Frost's poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening on the screen, and then have the screen randomly light up with white dots (simulating snow "falling" on the poem, and slowly covering it up). Like the VIC, we saved our programs on a cassette tape *. I remember spending hours after class typing in the program for an Asteroids-style video game, which I found in the back of a computer magazine. Unfortunately, I probably typed in an error somewhere along the way, as it never worked.

A college friend had a Commodore 64. She had a fairly full-featured (for the era) word-processing program called Paperback Writer -- another friend of ours had written his own fantasy role-playing game rules, and he spent weeks typing up the rules on the C64, and then printing them out on the dot-matrix tractor-drive printer. She also had several primitive video games, and a text-based adventure game based on "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

* - Parenthetically, I didn't see an internal hard drive on a personal computer until one of the IBM PCs at my college work-study job got an upgrade with a small hard drive, in about 1986.

[elmwood]

Seemed like all the hobby PCs from the era had biorhythm programs, simple chess and board games, terminal programs to call into bulletin boards, loan calculators, flashcard-type trainers, and sine wave generators.

[Onomatopoeia]

I still have my VIC-20! This was my very first computer. I ran down to my basement when I saw this thread and brought it up. Haha! "VIC-20, The Friendly Computer with Color and Music!" I haven't looked at this thing in over 20 years. Interesting...the keyboard has both a $ and a ₤ key.

Hah! I still have the tape player/recorder and all my cartridges and tapes.

I have the following games on cartridge: Jupiter Lander (VIC-1907), Mission Impossible (VIC-1916), The Count (VIC-1917), Road Race (VIC-1909), Sargon II Chess (VIC-1919), and Omega Race (VIC-1924). Games I have on cassette are: VIKMAN, Krazy Kong, Alien Blitz, Space Pyramid, Splatman, River Race, Snakman, Amok, 3-D maze, and Reflections (whatever that is).

Non games cassettes I have are: Math Duel, Sky Math, CSA Composer, VIC Word Processor, and Home Inventory.

I also have two expansion cartridges: VIC-1110 8K RAM Cartridge, and VIC-1211A Super Expander with 3K RAM Cartridge.

Heh. I feel like a kid at Christmas again. I was in love with my VIC-20 until the Tandy TRS-80 drew my interest away and I chucked the VIC-20 aside like an old boot.

Now, what can I do with this thing? O_o ...well, back to the basement it goes.

[Hippy Hollow]

I had a Commodore 64 from 1983 until I put it away around in 1990 or so. We used to clown the poor saps that had VIC-20s because... they couldn't do shit. Keep in mind this was in UK, so the players were the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, and the Amstrad... and the Commodore 64. Speccys and C64s were the lion's share of all of the games and the scraps were left to the others. The VIC-20 and the TI-994A weren't even in the game, so to speak.

We used to go into the Upper Heyford BX and type the following on the poor VIC on display:

10 ? "I WISH I WAS A COMMODORE 64",
20 GOTO 10
RUN

High point of comedy, I tell you.

The C64 had a Mac-like word processor, GEOS, that I used to write papers in high school.

[Evil Captor]

there was a program called "Adventure Writer" for the C64 that let you write some nifty text adventure games without a lot of programming skills. OK, you were basically doing database management with it, and setting flags is KINDA programming-ish, but since they called it "Adventure Game WRITING" it was kinda ... sorta ... writing. I mean, you hardly noticed.

I wrote a game based on the Cthulhu Mythos back then for ... oh, this'll date me ... a Quantumlink contest for an original text adventure game. Tied for third place! Ok, there were four contestants ... but damn, that was fun! Still got the T-shirt I won.

[CurtC]

I had a C64 way back when, then five or six years ago I got one of those games that's just a joystick, with cables that plug the video and audio into your TV. On this joystick game was every game you ever saw on the C64, plus some. The little device had what was essentially a C64 inside it, with all the games on a disk drive emulator.

In fact, when you turn it on, you briefly see the two-tone blue screen and the command
LOAD "*",8,1
(or something like that, it's off the top of my head).

Ah, the memories. It's amazing to think that this little device I bought for $5, we would have paid over $1000 for back in the early 80s.

[Hippy Hollow]

Originally Posted by CurtC

I had a C64 way back when, then five or six years ago I got one of those games that's just a joystick, with cables that plug the video and audio into your TV. On this joystick game was every game you ever saw on the C64, plus some. The little device had what was essentially a C64 inside it, with all the games on a disk drive emulator.

In fact, when you turn it on, you briefly see the two-tone blue screen and the command
LOAD "*",8,1
(or something like that, it's off the top of my head).

Ah, the memories. It's amazing to think that this little device I bought for $5, we would have paid over $1000 for back in the early 80s.

I have one of these too. It has about 30 games (if your has more, I'd love to know where you got it!) and it was built by a young woman who figured out how to put an entire C64 on one circuit board. I got mine from a guy on a C64 board about a year ago... I planned to give it as a Christmas gift but I kept it for myself.

I still play the game Paradroid on it. It was never about the graphics (on early 64 games). All about playability..

[engineer_comp_geek]

The Vic 20 was at the start of the glory days of the 8 bit computers. The Vic 20 was never all that popular. The Commodore 64 was much more popular.

Commodore had the absolute worst crappy cassette interface out there. They stored every program twice, which was its way of doing error detection. When it read in data, it read both versions and if they disagreed, it considered that a load failure and bailed out. So basically since it was twice as slow and half as reliable as other cassette interfaces out there.

The "vic" in Vic 20 referred to the Video Interface Chip. The C64 also had a vic, and also had a sid (sound interface device). These chips offloaded a lot of the video and sound processing so that the main processor didn't have to worry about it as much. This is why the lowly C64 with its 1 MHz clock and 64k of RAM could run circles around later 5 MHz IBM PCs with 512 MB of RAM when it came to games.

The C64 also had the 1541 disk drive available. This whopping huge 170k disk drive (yes, I said 170k) was a huge improvement over the crappy cassette interface.

The Apple II and the TRS-80 (aka "trash 80") computers were very popular at the time as well. Atari was also popular because they had Atari games available for them, and Atari was the big guy on the block back then as far as computer games went. There were a LOT of 8 bit systems out there. You also had Timex Sinclairs and TI 99/4s, the Tandy CoCo (color computer), and many others.

Aside from games, you had word processors available, programs that would balance your checkbook, and even primitive database programs that you could do all sorts of things with.

Computers back then came with schematic diagrams, memory maps, and opcode lists. If you wanted to do anything other than play games or simple word processing, you needed to be a halfway decent computer hacker. Most users were very technically inclined and knowledgeable people. Easy point and click was still a long way away in the future. The easiest it got for a Commodore was LOAD "*",8,1. If that didn't mean anything to you, then you weren't computer savvy enough to use a computer back then.

With a blazingly fast 300 baud modem (hint - for those of you who don't realize what speed that is, I can type faster than that) you could connect to bulletin boards, which were computer sites that you could connect to via phone line. You could download software, play games, and of course, there was computer porn, even back then. If you had access, you could even dial into primitive mainframe networks that were forming the beginnings of what would later become the internet.

Printers were certainly available. The two most common type were dot matrix and daisy wheel. Dot matrix would print in dots on the page, and they were really hard to read. Daisy wheels were basically like typewriters, so the text was easy to read but they couldn't do graphics at all. The cheaper dot matrix printers printed on thermal paper, which was horrible. For a couple hundred bucks you could get a dot matrix that printed on real paper, which was a big improvement.

Programs, usually written in BASIC, were available in books and magazines, but you had to type them in, and they were hundreds and hundreds of lines long. If you made a typo, the program wouldn't work correctly, and you'd have to debug it (with no real debugging tools available) to figure out exactly where you'd gone wrong. I typed a couple of programs in, but mostly I found it far too tedious.

Programs also came on cartridge ROMs or cassettes or disks, depending on what you had available in your system.

Word processors were generally very primitive, and were not WYSIWYG. On the commodores, you had a 40 column screen (until the C128, which had both 40 and 80 column resolutions available) and printers were typically 80 columns wide, so there was no way to make it look on the screen like it would look on the paper. The Apple II had an 80 column screen, as did the TRS-80, but they both required a special monitor. The commodores could hook up to a standard television, which is why their screen width was more limited.

Originally Posted by Derleth

In addition, the processor that actually executed the C64's software was a lot slower than modern processors. I mean, three full orders of magnitude slower: It ran at right around a million instructions per second, whereas modern processors are running at around a billion instructions per second.

Actually, it was worse than that. The C64's 6510 ran at 1 MHz, but it was nowhere near 1 instruction per clock. I don't remember how many cycles a typical instruction took, but I'm thinking it was more like 0.25 to 0.33 MIPs at best.

Its instruction set was also very limited compared to a modern processor. It could only handle numbers from 0 to 255, so if you needed to handle bigger numbers you had to do it with multiple instructions. The 6510, like most processors of that era, could not multiply or divide, so if you needed to multiply or divide you had to write a subroutine that used adds and shifts or subtracts and shifts to do it (google "Booth's algorithm" if you want to know how you can multiply and divide without multiplying and dividing).

[RaftPeople]

I used to write and sell video games for the trs-80 color computer back then.

This was the first one I sold through a company called Spectral Associates. It was a copy of the arcade game Xevious, I called my version Devious. I was pretty young when I did this one (high school) and it was my first, it ended up being ok but not great:
http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/devious.html


This one is a copy of QIX which I called Qiks and I was really proud of because it matched the original really well and had a natural feel when you played it. Also, the reviews say it is better then our competitors version, which was kind of fun because when I first sent out copies of my work to various companies to try to sell my stuff, that company rejected me:
http://nitros9.lcurtisboyle.com/qiks.html



I also started another one called Module Man but I'm really confused because I'm pretty sure I abandoned it, but I see it listed on the internet as one of Spectral Associates games - they may have finished it.

[Thudlow Boink]

For a real education—or, for some of us, a trip down memory lane—take a look at some of the old issues of COMPUTE! GAZETTE magazine archived online. This was a magazine for users of the Commodore VIC-20 and Commodore 64. The articles, the ads, and the programs you could type in will all give you an idea of what people could and did do with these computers.

[Sampiro]

Was there a monitor available for the Vic 20 or was a TV the only option?

I wonder if it would be possible to connect a Vic 20 to a modern day flatscreen TV. In the early 1980s cable-ready was still a feature you paid extra for; I wonder if there'd be any way to interface one with a modern TV at all.

[Shagnasty]

Originally Posted by Evil Captor

there was a program called "Adventure Writer" for the C64 that let you write some nifty text adventure games without a lot of programming skills. OK, you were basically doing database management with it, and setting flags is KINDA programming-ish, but since they called it "Adventure Game WRITING" it was kinda ... sorta ... writing. I mean, you hardly noticed.

I wrote a game based on the Cthulhu Mythos back then for ... oh, this'll date me ... a Quantumlink contest for an original text adventure game. Tied for third place! Ok, there were four contestants ... but damn, that was fun! Still got the T-shirt I won.

I had Adventure Writer too. It had a game prewritten for it that was like some generic Infocom game although not nearly as good but still fun. I wanted to enter that contest but I never finished my game well enough to send it in. Your 4th place counts for more than you think.

[Shagnasty]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Was there a monitor available for the Vic 20 or was a TV the only option?

I wonder if it would be possible to connect a Vic 20 to a modern day flatscreen TV. In the early 1980s cable-ready was still a feature you paid extra for; I wonder if there'd be any way to interface one with a modern TV at all.

You can do just about anything to go back in time electronically if you have the patience for it to hook the right series of components together. I don't know how easy it is to take an actual VIC-20 and make it work with a new TV but you can just skip that part. I run a Commodore 64 emulator on my PC hooked up to a large LCD TV so the final output is there.

The Commodore 64 and Vic-20 hook up to the auxiliary antenna connections through a little box like you used on video game systems like an Atari 2600. You flipped a switch on the connector box and tuned it in on a channel (usually 3 or 4). There has to be components at Radio shack that you can hook together to make that same connection to a new TV if you could find a working Vic-20 or Commodore 64.

[engineer_comp_geek]

Originally Posted by Sampiro

Was there a monitor available for the Vic 20 or was a TV the only option?

I wonder if it would be possible to connect a Vic 20 to a modern day flatscreen TV. In the early 1980s cable-ready was still a feature you paid extra for; I wonder if there'd be any way to interface one with a modern TV at all.

There were dedicated computer monitors available back then. I don't remember Commodore making one but I remember others being available.

A modern flat screen could connect to a Vic 20 as long as it can handle a plain old fashioned analog TV signal, which most can. Just turn it to channel 3.

[Dewey Finn]

Originally Posted by Shagnasty

The Commodore 64 and Vic-20 hook up to the auxiliary antenna connections through a little box like you used on video game systems like an Atari 2600. You flipped a switch on the connector box and tuned it in on a channel (usually 3 or 4). There has to be components at Radio shack that you can hook together to make that same connection to a new TV if you could find a working Vic-20 or Commodore 64.

As I remember, this was called an RF modulator.

[RaftPeople]

Originally Posted by engineer_comp_geek

Actually, it was worse than that. The C64's 6510 ran at 1 MHz, but it was nowhere near 1 instruction per clock. I don't remember how many cycles a typical instruction took, but I'm thinking it was more like 0.25 to 0.33 MIPs at best.

Its instruction set was also very limited compared to a modern processor. It could only handle numbers from 0 to 255, so if you needed to handle bigger numbers you had to do it with multiple instructions. The 6510, like most processors of that era, could not multiply or divide, so if you needed to multiply or divide you had to write a subroutine that used adds and shifts or subtracts and shifts to do it (google "Booth's algorithm" if you want to know how you can multiply and divide without multiplying and dividing).

The nice thing about the trash-80 color was that it used the 6809 which had some 16 bit operations, 16 bit addressing and a multiply operation.

It ran at 0.89mhz and, as you say, many if not most of the ops were > 1 cycle (I remember counting cycles in a routine and looking for ways to reduce them).

[engineer_comp_geek]

Commodore called it an RF modulator, but it really wasn't one. It was just a switch. The actual RF modulator was inside the computer.

[Heracles]

Originally Posted by engineer_comp_geek

Commodore called it an RF modulator, but it really wasn't one. It was just a switch. The actual RF modulator was inside the computer.

The Commodore 64 had an internal RF modulator, but the VIC-20's modulator was an external box that hooked onto the composite monitor connector on the back. It was included in the base kit, as TVs didn't have composite connectors back then.

[Heracles]

A magazine called COMPUTE! (or was it COMPUTE!'s Gazette?) published a capable little word processor called SpeedScript, for the VIC-20 and Commodore 64. This was around 1983 I think. SpeedScript was written in assembly (initially you typed in the program as hex numbers from the magazine pages). Worked like a charm, for the low standards we had back then. Justification, page numbering, I think it even had a word counter. I hacked mine to be able to view and print accented characters, which weren't available natively on those computers.

More advanced word processors became available pretty soon afterwards, but only for the Commodore 64.

[pulykamell]

Originally Posted by Hippy Hollow

The C64 had a Mac-like word processor, GEOS, that I used to write papers in high school.

GEOS wasn't a word processor. GEOS was the Commodore implementation of a GUI-based operating system. geoWrite was the word processor contained within. I remember doing high school papers using geoWrite and geoPaint, as well.

[Derleth]

engineer_comp_geek, RaftPeople: I was trying to pitch my explanation at a somewhat less technical level than that, but you are certainly more correct than I was on the issue of how many instructions per second the 6510 could execute. Now let's leave the subject be before someone gets the bright idea to attempt to explain how many instructions per second the Core microarchitecture can execute.

[RaftPeople]

Originally Posted by Derleth

engineer_comp_geek, RaftPeople: I was trying to pitch my explanation at a somewhat less technical level than that, but you are certainly more correct than I was on the issue of how many instructions per second the 6510 could execute. Now let's leave the subject be before someone gets the bright idea to attempt to explain how many instructions per second the Core microarchitecture can execute.

Simpler times back then, you knew exactly what would happen every cycle. That was actually a really good time to learn assembly.

[AnalogSignal]

The Vic 20 was ridiculously primitive by today's standards but at the time it was great. It was probably the first really affordable home computer in the US. We bought ours at Toys R Us for $300. This is what the Vic 20 looked like when you turned it on:

* * * * CBM BASIC V2 * * * *
3583 BYTES FREE
READY.
█



The computer was essentially a blank slate, ready for you to type in a BASIC program. If you wanted to load a program from cassette tape, you did this:

LOAD
PRESS PLAY ON TAPE



It took minutes to load a program from cassette tape and sometimes it didn't work and you had to reload the program. As mentioned previously, there were cartridges with games available. I had Jupiter Lander, Omega Race, and Gorf.

Originally Posted by Thudlow Boink

For a real education—or, for some of us, a trip down memory lane—take a look at some of the old issues of COMPUTE! GAZETTE magazine archived online.

I had an assembly language program published in this magazine. It was nice to see the magazine again.

[johnpost]

Originally Posted by engineer_comp_geek

There were dedicated computer monitors available back then. I don't remember Commodore making one but I remember others being available.

the 1702 was a sweet monitor that Commodore made.

if you had money you went with the 64, that monitor, a 1541 FD or two. schools could go for that.

if you had less money then you went for a Vic 20, 1530 dataset and your tv.

[Student Driver]

The Vic 20 was very peripheral-compatible with the Commodore 64. The Vic had its own disk drive available (the 1540), and later Commodore disk drives like the 1541, 1571, and 1581 could also be used with it. High-quality printing was available (as several folks have mentioned), though printers were ghastly expensive back in the day. Several companies produced interfaces that allowed the use of IEEE-488 and RS-232 devices giving access to business-class peripherals. Spooling to the printer could be done through a lot of these interfaces; a user might be limited to a few pages in memory, but it was possible to use programs that would serially load word processor files and spool them out so that they all printed in one large batch. It used Atari-compatible joysticks, which meant that the highest quality and greatest variety of controllers until the NES days were compatible with it, and one could even hook up the Commodore 1350 mouse (or use the 1351 if you know how to activate digital mode).

As far as computing capabilities, it was deliberately low-powered compared to its contemporaries (the original Apple II, Atari 400/800, TI-99/4a) because it was meant as an entry-level machine. There was a big push by home computer marketers to try to win over consumers from the video games market, so having a games-playing system priced competitively with game consoles that could *also* introduce computers was the goal; once you got someone used to using computers, you could then entice them into upgrading systems. Commodore performed admirably with the Vic. As cheap as an Atari 2600, with a good keyboard (something amazing at the time, as most cheap systems tended to use chiclet or membrane keyboards), graphics competitive with then-current 2600 titles. It was incredibly popular during its short life, and seemed to work as expected; it caught the eyes of games players who then upgraded en masse to the Commodore 64 once it was released (which was made parts-compatible to the Vic to make sure that the large Vic audience didn't get lured by Atari or Apple).

The Vic/C64 range also turned Commodore into a big player in computer gaming, which was interesting because of their roots as a business-furniture/supplies company (they made swivel chairs, filing cabinets, thermostats, calculators and such) and that their initial moves into computers were as logical outgrowths of their calculator lines-- fusty business machines great for office work and terrible at games-playing. It came to haunt them within just a few years; the stigma of being good games machines meant that folks who wanted to keep upgrading to more powerful computers-- or who needed serious systems for school and office-- ignored the C128, B-series, and the incredible Amigas.

[Mangetout]

Originally Posted by Hippy Hollow

I had a Commodore 64 from 1983 until I put it away around in 1990 or so. We used to clown the poor saps that had VIC-20s because... they couldn't do shit. Keep in mind this was in UK, so the players were the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the BBC Micro, and the Amstrad... and the Commodore 64.

There were a few other players in the game - the Oric 1 (and later, Oric Atmos), The Dragon 32, a slew of MSX-based compatibles and some weird ones that never really went anywhere, like the Jupiter Ace

[Bytegeist]

Originally Posted by engineer_comp_geek

The Apple II had an 80 column screen, as did the TRS-80, but they both required a special monitor. The commodores could hook up to a standard television, which is why their screen width was more limited.

The first two models of the Apple II — the original II, and the II Plus — were 40-column, uppercase only. You could buy third-party cards to give you 80 columns and lowercase letters, but that was extra, and non-standard. The IIe, which came out in 1983 (after the limited heyday of the VIC-20, I think) had 80-columns and lowercase as a standard option, and soon after as a built-in feature.

All the Apple II models could also be hooked up to standard television, like the Commodores. They all had composite video output, built in. However, 80-column text mode was pretty much useless on a standard TV. You really needed a dedicated monitor, preferably monochrome, to use 80-column text.

Actually, it was worse than that. The C64's 6510 ran at 1 MHz, but it was nowhere near 1 instruction per clock. I don't remember how many cycles a typical instruction took, but I'm thinking it was more like 0.25 to 0.33 MIPs at best.

About right. The instruction times range from 2 to 7 cycles, with typical instructions lying more in the range of 3 to 5.

[Balthisar]

I actually got started on a Commodore PET (one of the later ones, with a real keyboard). It belonged to what we in Michigan call the intermediate school district, where I had access via a relative. It had real disk drives; none of that cassette crap. I felt sorry for my cousin who only has a VIC-20 with a cassette at home. Except I was envious that he (you know) had it at home. I had to make due (eventually) with a TRS-80 MC-10. My neighbor and best friend satisfied my more advanced needs with his C=64, until I saved my paper route money and one-upped him with my C=128. Of course all my games were pirated C=64 games, but all my programming was done on the C=128.

Those really were the days. I learned 6502/8502 assembly language so I could write my own BBS (I had to translate Commodore ASCII to standard ASCII and back, and assembly was fast at it). I then used that to write my own text-based windowing system. I think I also was one of the first pre-LGPL users in integrating a SID-player binary with a kick-ass user interface (yeah, it worked with a Commodore analogue mouse!).

Aside from Ahoy! and Compute's Gazette, there was Run magazine. I was published there (only in the Magic Tricks column, though).