I realized this week that the first computer I ever used was released 40 years ago. Time flies when you’re having fun!

My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, fully decked out with all the peripherals: a Commodore C2N Datasette cassette tape drive, a Commodore 1541 5.25-inch floppy drive, a Commodore VIC-1525 8-pin dot-matrix printer, and loads of cartridges and tape-based software, and even an expansion card so that I could have multiple memory expansion cartridges installed simultaneously. My parents even bought a dedicated small color TV to use as a monitor for it. It was heaven!

Sure, the system had some limitations — the VIC-20 could only display 22 characters per line and had 23 lines of text on the screen, it took ages to load or save programs on tape (one game literally took 30 minutes to load!), the base unexpanded VIC-20 computer only had 3.5 KiB of usable RAM, it used it’s own character set (nicknamed PETSCII because it was the same character set used in the earlier Commodore PET computers) instead of standard ASCII, and the BASIC built into the VIC-20 required lots of esoteric PEEK and POKE commands to do anything involving graphics or sound. But it was a computer! I reveled in learning how to write programs in BASIC, spent hours typing in programs printed in issues of COMPUTE! Magazine or RUN Magazine, and even dabbled a bit with assembly language programming and programming in Forth (yes, there was an official Commodore ROM cartridge for the VIC-20 containing a Forth language interpreter!).

So here’s to you, little Commodore VIC-20! Happy belated 40th birthday!

For more info about the Commodore VIC-20 (known as the Commodore VC-20 in Germany), check out this YouTube video from “The 8-Bit Guy” explaining the history of it: https://youtu.be/yg04GyhS3ss

If you’re interested in trying out the Commodore VIC-20 (or the other Commodore 8-bit systems from the 1970s and 1980s), check out VICE (The Versatile Commodore Emulator). It’s a freeware software emulator of the PET, VIC-20, 64, 128, Plus/4, and 16 that runs on top of Windows, Linux, and macOS.