Howdy Fellow Commodore Users!

Now that August has shown up, back to school seems to be a constant reminder everywhere we go. With that in mind, I'll put a plug in for our educational software your own club has. Most of the software ranges from the early years of school thru the later years, so I'm sure you can find that extra piece of educational software to meet your needs for that extra study help at home. Remember, extra studying doesn't always hurt, and can always help in understanding the basics of a lesson.

All this year I've been seeing mention of the Commodore 64's 20th anniversary. I guess I was too young (just got out of college in June 1982), and was used to doing programs via the college mainframe computer the IBM 370 which gave me my first exposure to programming. Programming I did learn officially was SPSS, COBOL, and unofficially BASIC, and hacking the mainframe via a dialup terminal my roommate brought home from workstudy at the Engineering Department at the university.

My girlfriend at the time was a Computer Science Major, and at that time, I failed to understand what the big deal of computers was going to be farther down the road. Often we would study together when we had the same classes, but she did get one class that I decided to learn on my own: BASIC. I went to the computer lab to watch her do her homework on the monstrous sized equipment that was really more than a stand alone terminal to the mainframe. What brand of computer this was escapes me, but I remember her bringing the huge 8 inch floppy disks. On these she stored her homework, not on punchcards as I was doing. That was what intrigued me, that information could be saved on something other than a mainframe computer's hard drive, or a stack of cards. This was something I had to look into, but didn't really want to spend the time going thru a class. In retrospect, I probably should have taken that class for the credit of learning basic, and to learn better programming skills to boot.

I bought one floppy from the College bookstore to hold my programming examples, figuring I'd never need more than that, I didn't. I learned the basics from my girlfriend like how to format the disk, how to erase the current program in memory without turning off the machine, probably her instructions to me were simple, but also helping her to learn to make sure she understood what she was being graded for! I followed along some of the programming examples she had from her class, then decided I wanted to do something fun. So I found a type in program for a game called WUMPUS. Yes, I typed it all in from BASIC, on a computer that wasn't mine, just to learn the fundamentals of BASIC. When I finally got it all typed in and tried to run it, of course it had some errors from mistyped commands, but troubleshooting didn't seem any harder than the other computing classes I had taken. I finally had the program debugged and played several games of WUMPUS without any errors. I felt so accomplished.

My first home computer purchase didn't happen until after I graduated from college, and that 20th anniversary will happen on September 27th. I had a friend from my high school days that owned a Vic20 for several months, and he allowed me access to it to play around on and see how much fun owning a personal computer could be. So, the two of us decided to take a trip to Columbus Ohio and buy my own computer setup. I knew I wanted a Vic20, and a tape drive, so the dealer at Tech HiFi didn't have a hard sale trying to get me to buy anything. He did try to get me to buy some programs, which I did pass on, since I wanted to first learn how to program and use my new found acquisition. Anyway, I could always borrow programs from my friend. I followed the Vic20 User's Guide thru the learning process of the computer, and I typed in programs from Compute magazine. These activities kept me busy for hours.

It wasn't until several years later, that I bought a Commodore 64. Vic20 software was shrinking from the marketplace, being replaced by the more powerful C64 software. When I tried to type in a program that took up all of the Vic20 memory, I knew at that point I needed to upgrade to the C64. So, if I don't seem so excited about the C64s anniversary, don't fear it's because I'm not a fan of the C64, my real original passion is the Vic20. 9-27-82.

Processor: 6502, 1MHz

Memory: 5kB RAM exp. to 29kB

Sound: 3 channels + white noise

Text display: 23x22

Graphics display: 176x158, 16 colors

Keyboard: Typewriter-style

Interfaces:

Cassette interface

RF interface

Released: 1981

Keep on Commodoring!