I had the compiler cartridge for the CoCo and did my first Assembly Language on it. I also remember Hot Coco. One of my magazines sent an experimental plastic record with it so you could play it on the phonograph and record it to a tape. The program on the tape worked for some people, but not most. Innovation! I only got rid of those mags in 2008 after the flooding.
Well, I had to cheat. Let’s just say that the word “mmmmm” would look like one big rectangle. But we’ve all seen, by now, those texts with the middle letters of each word all mixed up, and our brains can still decode the message. Same idea.
Here, I just did a sample (in MS Paint, in Windows 7, on a 1920-by-1200 LCD screen, on a quad-core Core i7 with HyperThreading and 6 gigabytes of RAM).
The original, 160 pixels wide: click here
But remember that this was displayed across a black-and-white TV screen, and took up almost all its width. Here’s a zoomed version: click here
A zoomed and widened version, because pixels on a VIC-20 were by no means square: click here
Remember: squint! 
H.
Mine too, although some EE friends helped me with this. I remember having 2 sets of RAM chips piggybacked on top of each other and 1 had a pin bent up with a wire soldered to it and the other end to some post on the circuit board.
That’s pretty cool. I don’t even remember when I got rid of mine, but I wish I had saved the CPU, I really liked the 6809.
Yes and yes, but not to the level we have now.
Bulletin board systems are where you want to look first, but that alone is only part of the story: Bulletin board systems eventually connected to each other in networks, such as FidoNet, which allowed email to be exchanged between geographically distant systems without anyone getting too hammered by long-distance charges. This also allowed the existence of mailing lists, called echoes on FidoNet, that work about the same way as mailing lists do today.
It should be emphasized that FidoNet was one of many networks of that era, and it wasn’t even alone in the home computer BBS world. If you moved up the food chain into minicomputers running Unix, you ran into UUCP and the first incarnation of Usenet, which worked roughly like FidoNet and FidoNet echoes: A store-and-forward message-switched network built around the phone system. On IBM mainframes there was BITNET, ARPANET was running on a variety of systems but mostly DEC PDP-10 mainframes, and there were others besides, all routing email between each other to one degree or another. (It was even possible for a time to read Usenet via FidoNet via some opportune gateways between FidoNet and the UUCP world.) What this did to email addresses was something really quite astounding: Each address had to have routing information relevant to each network it would pass through, and there was no rule about how to compose an address for a message that had to pass through multiple networks. All people had were guidelines and empirical test to figure out what would work.
All this died off in the 1990s, when the Internet ate the world. By 1993, a given BBS was either already dead, dying, or in the process of converting itself into a dial-up ISP and dying anyway as far as being a BBS was concerned. These days even CompuServe email addresses look bizarre and FidoNet and BBSes in general have died back to a core of true enthusiasts.
Textfiles.com is the best place to find out about classic BBSes these days.
There’s even a BBS documentary, which you can also legally download for free.
They’re still running commercials for these things?
Ann Arbor would have been long distance for me (no PC Pursuit for me) – was A^2 covered in Horst Man’s list? I couldn’t wait for the monthly updates to see what new BBSs were in my local calling area!
Luckily I never had to deal with acoustic couplers, but my first modem was a 300 baud. I think it was free by signing up for Quantum Link. Of course back then, it was billed by the minute. I think it was 6¢ per minute! I saved my allowance pretty damned quickly in order to afford a real Hayes 1200 baud modem. Or maybe even 2400 baud. I don’t remember my modem speed progression all that well after 300.
Wow, this brings back memories. The Vic20 was the first computer I owned. I bought it while I was in college and mainly used it to access the school’s mainframe from my dorm room via the phone (which my roommate didn’t always appreciate). I used a little B&W TV as the monitor, so I could also watch TV (which my roommate did appreciate). I had a cassette player so I used it to type in and play games as well. Before college was over, I upgraded to a Commodore 64 and kept that machine for a few years, until I finally started buying and using IBM PCs.
As for the magazines, I very much remember Compute! as well as Ahoy. I would buy them and type in the games.
The Vic 20 and similar machines such as the TRS 80 Color Computer which I had, were mostly games machines. That doesn’t you couldn’t and people didn’t do serious work with them. See http://glensideccc.com/
On of the few pieces of software I ever purchased was Telewriter 64. My mother and my wife’s grandfather though it was wonderful. Combined with an Underwood-Oliveti printer that had a large print font in its firmware, I could compose letters their old eyes could read. Later, I was printing out the kids emails and including them, emails I recieved on my 300 baud modem
I also did some serious work. I used it to design a chute for a machine at work. The project involved solving numerous triangles. The union sort of ignored me making cardboard prototypes on my office floor. I would calculate stuff at night at home. Then I would make a cardboard model at work the next day. Eventually I had a design that worked. I sent it out to be fabricated. I knew my people couldn’t build it unless I laid stuff out and held the pieces while they welded. I didn’t want to push the union that far. Turned out I had to go do it at the the sheet metal shop. I was quite pleased when the guys came to me while waiting for the metal one and asked me to make another cardboard one as the first one wore out.
Remember sirds? The 3-D dot things? I wrote a program to convert Color Computer graphics to sirds. It took a long time to print out 8’’ wide ones on my printer. I did the IVCF logo at Carnegie Melon on it. My sons class mates were amazed that somebody could do something like that with a program they wrote themselves. Actually my son and son in law to be both contributed to the program.
I did my income tax on it for years. I input the wages, federal withholding, state, local in data statements.
data 12345, 678. 90, 12
Like most of the serious users, I eventually added a disk drive, a 7 1/2 floppy. I used a third party CDOS more powerful than RSDOS.
My father in law changed how industrial crystalization was done using an even more basic TRS 80 Model 1.
If you scroll down on the Wikipedia page on the Datasette, there’s a sound sample of a tape with data recorded on it.
Ouch. 
I can read about two-thirds of it. I could see getting used to it after a little while.
I had a Commodore PET I bought in 1978(!!). The Commodore 64 came out about 1982 IIRC and the VIC 20 the next year.
The VIC 20 was meant to be a much cheaper intro to computers; IIRC, the price difference was about $600 for the C64 and $320 for the V20. Along with cheap came compromise. The VIC-20 had a 22-char by 23 char screen (What can you do with that?) because TV quality in those days was crap. A C64 with 40x25 was barely readable sometimes. The NTSC colour signal meant that colours smeared horizontally; back then, most TV’s were not designed for the sharpness that text on screen required, particularly the colour signal. The C64 and the VIC-20 could put out composite video (the yellow VCR cable) and the C64 could put out channels 3 and 4; however, back in those days TV’s lasted 10 or 20 years and VCR’s were new, VHS was just beating out Beta, so not a lot of TV’s had a video in line; most needed a channel modulator. I recall at one computer show a booth used a C64 monitor to play videotapes - so the picture was far sharper than you would see on a typical TV.
Actually, the tape unit for the PET and C64 was pretty good. While TRS-80’s and others were letting you use any old tape deck, and you had to fiddle with things like record level to get the volume right, the Commodores used a dedicated tape drive and interface to ensure correct recording levels. I heard horror stories from VIC-20 users, but the earlier, less cheap C64 and PET tapes worked much better than competitors.
The PET used a parallel bus (IEEE 488?) for peripherals, and the peripherals like disks and printers had to be little computers in their own right, or you had to buy a 488-to-printer adapter for more than the printer itself. For Apple, jobs/Woz’s smart move was to design a computer where the processor was also the smarts for the diskette drive; so a generic floppy drive could plug in, they reduced the number of chips needed in a disk controller by a factor of 10. You could find those floppy drives for a few hundred dollars or less, while my dual-disk PET drive cost $1500, even more than the $1200 for the PET itself.
3.5K RAM was pathetic; you could do rudimentary programming. I think the Commodore intent was to have most of the applications (games) come out as cartridges like Atari game consoles. But they were relying on a 3rd-party market to supply a lot of these, and it never really took off. Also, the poor resolution and the general “me too” design meant it never got taken seriously. I think a lot were bought by parents who wanted to satisfy the kids’ demand for a computer without spending almost a thousand dollars.
Quality control was foreign to Commodore; I bought some relatives a C64 for Christmas when they first came out, and it died within 2 days. We went to the store for a replacement, and 2 of the 5 they had were already dead. The replacement died in a month, and that replacement died 6 months later. I had 2 given to me as junk about 1990 - they had a habit of blowing the (custom) keyboard chip, meaning a swath of keys would die. Replacing the chip was worth more than the computer. OTOH, my PET was still working pretty good when I trashed it in 2006; I looked on eBay and an original PET 2001 was going for $5; you can’t ship one for that price.
Before everything standardized on the IBM PC and its clones, the computer market was pretty lively…
No. The VIC-20 came out in 1980, followed by the C=64. The VIC-20 wasn’t a compromise on the C=64; the C=64 was an evolution of the VIC-20.
This is correct. I purchased my VIC-20 sometime in 1981, and remember being upset when I saw the announcement for Commodore 64 the following year.
the VIC-20 and the C64 could use an interface adapter to give a IEEE-488 interface and you could hook up to the 4040 dual disk drive used in the PET system.
learning that interface protocol was the earliest computer knowledge for myself that carried through the longest intact. i did learn BASIC in both Apple and Commodore flavors though they had both variations from the rest of the world.
The rest of the world was no less chaotic. Pretty much every computer BASIC at that time differed from all the others in significant ways. The companies were making it up as they went along, and made their own choices. It’s not like there was a BASIC standards committee to appeal to.
In particular, graphics, sound, and file I/O were done in very different and incompatible ways across all the various machines. Your knowledge of these things on one platform wouldn’t help you on any of the others.
I giggled at this. The early “clones” were anything but standardized. Before the time IBM rolled out the AT, it was a good bet that software that would run on a real PC would not run on a clone. Software vendors often had a MSDOS and IBM-DOS version of their wares, and often you had to buy the computer maker’s version.
In the late 80 I worked at a place that made a double computer. A customer had standardized on an early clone but also needed something that was available only for a real PC, so we put both in one box sharing a power supply with an KV switch..not a KVM switch, as only apples normally used mice in those days.
I think the non-clone clone was a sony…japanese for sure. By the time I started working there they were out of production and I only saw the bare MBs in the big chassis we moved them to.
The clone I really wanted but couldn’t afford ANY computer at all was the Heathkit version that had a breadboarding area on the top. My “rich” college classmates were assembling CPM computers in S-100 crates back then.
You are right though, that small computers were all over the place before the IBM-PC came along. In my university EE classes it was all mainframes and a small computer was a rack with a LSI-11. 8" floppy drives were standard, and each student typically only had one, unless they were taking classes that used non-compatible systems.
As for the OP’s question, It wasn’t at all certain what we would do with a PC, much less a VIC-20. What people mostly did with them was either play games, or become interested in computers and move on. I knew a ham operator that worked up a logging program for a C64…which worked well if you could keep the RF from the transmitter from crashing the computer, and didn’t mind listening to all the hash on the receiver. A couple I knew had an early PC clone, and one of the things they tried to do was to keep all their cooking recipes on it. It proved far less useful than a box of recipe cards.
things did rapidly settle down with the IBM PC era. the earlier game featured computers (cartridge slot) and the Apple had a lot of unique hardware which had to be accommodated in BASIC.
Back in the early 80’s, I was tediously doing MRP on a TI programable calculator. I knew the color computer I had at home would be a great step up. I also knew I would never get approval to buy such a ‘‘toy’’ at work. Perhaps I should have declared myself a professional and bought an Osborne. Instead, I went computer shopping. I talked to an apple dealer. He said he could sell me a $2500 Apple that would do exactly what I needed, about 5 times as much as a Color Computer or Commodore system that would have done the job. He also said I would never get approval for it and what I needed to do was wait until he got his IBM franchise and then I could get approval for a $3500 dollar system. What neither he nor I knew that since I was assigned to a plant and not divisional staff, well, what had to happen first would not be facilitated by global warming. Actually the IBM PC was a great triumph of marketing over capability. it stunk compared to the older color computer. It had a strictly 8 bit chip. The older CC had a Motorola 6809 that used 16 bits in some operations.
Later I was given a terminal to a main frame with some of the worst possible software. It was a vertically integrated outfit. My orders were generated on the same mainframe. Yet, I had to print them out and then key then into my data base. Worse yet, once I shipped something, removing the order and inventory were 2 separate transactions. I could easily do one and not the other. I also could not order any raw materials until I had orders requiring them. I had run for years supplying material with less lead time than my raw material suppliers required. After fighting the system for a couple of months, I went back to the TI.
You had 8" floppies?!? I would have killed for floppies!
In my EE classes, we just had the mainframe that used reel-to-reel tapes, and programmed on punch cards.
I had to take one semester of Computer Science class (programming in Pascal) at UW-Madison in order to get into the School of Business, in the spring of '85. It was all on mainframe computers, but at least we were able to write the programs directly on terminals, and have them saved remotely (on a disk somewhere, I’m sure), rather than fiddling with punch cards or tapes.
They had just switched away from punch-cards a year or so earlier; as a result, they had thousands of thousands of blank punch cards which they gave away (my roommate used them as flash cards for his Arabic lessons).
Two years later ('87), my girlfriend was taking the same class. By then, they had ditched the mainframes entirely, and students were programming (in Pascal) on Macs, and saving their programs on 3.5" floppies.