Commodore once again had a number of firsts with the VIC-20. It
was the first computer to sell more than a million units, and it was
the first color computer to break the $300 price barrier. The "20" in
the VIC's name was just abritrary as the machine only had 5K of
RAM and a 22 column display. It was family friendly however, and
caught on with people of all ages. The mold that the VIC-20 was
made from would be repeated with the Commodore 64 and even
later with the Commodore 16. The VIC had built in BASIC v2.0
and ran a 6502A microprocessor at 1MHz. It had 16 colors and 3
sound voices.
VIC Trivia
In Germany, it was rebranded the VC-20 because of the play on the popular VW cars, and VIC when pronounced is very close to a swear word
The last VIC-20's were produced in January 1985, giving the VIC a full 4 year life cyclce
This computer is currently interactive in the Museum.
User Comments
Vicman on Sunday, May 05, 2013 Hi guys,
i've made many short game-video-snaps for the VIC-20
look on my YT channel. Maybe you want to link the videos
to your game entrys...
cheers,
Vicman
Anonymous on Sunday, May 05, 2013 www.youtube.com/user/Vicman110309
Bruce on Saturday, April 21, 2012 Back in the early 1980s, this was the first computer I did any programming on. I recently found one at a garage sale with the cassette recorder and a few games. I hooked it up to a TV and it still works great - I was just playing GORF on it last night!
Rob from Victoria BC Canada on Thursday, June 16, 2011 I remember when I got my first computer....this was it. I also remember it was the day before my brother was born January 9, 1983. The first game I played on it "Froggee" (not a typo...just a knock off frogger game. Very fond memories
Norm M. on Tuesday, February 22, 2011 I bought a VIC-20 at Canadian Tire back in the '80s (on sale for $80.00). My sister had one first a couple of years earlier (when it cost a lot more). I thought it would be great as a video generator I could use for TV repairs and adjustments. Those units were in the hundreds of dollars back then. I ended up programming in BASIC to generate labels and for inventory control purposes. I bought specialized cartridges for it to make programming a bit more streamlined and efficient. My kids loved the "babysitting" cartridge and "Serpentine" game. I even had a great personal accounting program which I used for years. I really got my $80 bucks worth out of this machine!
 "Commodore VIC-20")
