Commodore VIC-20

Commodore VIC-20 Specifications

The VIC-20 (known as the VC-20 in Germany and the VIC-1001 in Japan) is an 8-bit home computer which was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore's first personal computer, the PET. The VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units. As for commercial software offerings, an estimated 300 titles were available on cartridge, and another 500+ titles were available on tape. By comparison, the Atari 2600—the most popular of the video game consoles at the time—had a library of about 900 titles near the end of its production life (although many titles were extremely similar). Most cartridge games were ready to play as soon as the VIC-20 was turned on, as opposed to games on tape which required a time-consuming loading process. Titles on cartridge included Gorf, Cosmic Cruncher, Sargon II Chess, and many others. A handful of disk applications were released for the VIC-20.

As the Apple II gained momentum with the advent of VisiCalc in 1979, Jack Tramiel wanted a product that would compete in the same segment, to be presented at the January 1980 CES. For this reason Chuck Peddle and Bill Seiler started to design a computer named TOI (The Other Intellect). The TOI computer failed to materialize, mostly because it required an 80-column character display which in turn required the MOS Technology 6564 chip. However, the chip could not be used in the TOI since it required very expensive static RAM to operate fast enough.

As the new decade began, the price of computer hardware was dropping and Tramiel saw an emerging market for low-price computers, that could be sold at retail stores to relative novices rather than professionals or people with an electronics or programming background. Radio Shack had been achieving considerable success with the TRS-80 Model I, a relatively low-cost machine that was widely sold to novices and in 1980 released the Color Computer, which was aimed at the home and educational markets, used ROM cartridges for software, and connected to a TV set.

The VIC-20 was intended to be more economical than the PET computer. It was equipped with 5 KB of static RAM and used the same MOS 6502 CPU as the PET. The VIC-20's video chip, the MOS Technology VIC, was a general-purpose color video chip designed by Al Charpentier in 1977 and intended for use in inexpensive display terminals and game consoles, but Commodore could not find a market for the chip.

While newer PETs had the upgraded BASIC 4.0, with disk commands and improved garbage collection, the VIC-20 reverted to the 8 KB BASIC 2.0 used on earlier PETs as part of another of the design team's goals: 20 KB system ROMs. There are no dedicated sound or graphics features.

The VIC-20 has a composite output, which provides a sharper, cleaner picture if a dedicated monitor is used. The TRS-80 Color Computer and Atari 400 have only RF video output. An external RF modulator was necessary to use the computer with a TV set.

The "20" in the computer's name was widely assumed to refer to the text width of the screen (although in fact, the VIC-20 has 22-column text, not 20) or that it referred to the combined size of the system ROMs (8 KB BASIC+8 KB KERNAL+4 KB character ROM). Bob Yannes claimed that "20" meant nothing in particular and said "We simply picked '20' because it seemed like a friendly number and the computer's marketing slogan was 'The Friendly Computer'. I felt it balanced things out a bit since 'Vic' sounded like the name of a truck driver."