20 Facts About Commodore VIC-20

The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore's first personal computer, the PET.

The Commodore VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units.

Commodore VIC-20 was called VC-20 in Germany because the pronunciation of VIC with a German accent sounds like the German expletives "fick" or "wichsen".

Commodore VIC-20 was intended to be more economical than the PET computer.

Prototype produced by Yannes had very few of the features required for a real computer, so Robert Russell at Commodore VIC-20 headquarters had to coordinate and finish large parts of the design under the codename Vixen.

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At the time, Commodore VIC-20 had a glut of SRAM chips, so Tramiel decided these should be used in the new computer.

Since Commodore's BASIC had been designed for the PET which had only limited audiovisual capabilities, there were no dedicated sound or graphics features, thus VIC-20 programmers had to use large numbers of POKE and PEEK statements for this.

The Commodore VIC-20 was marketed in Japan as VIC-1001 before Commodore VIC-20 was introduced to the US.

Commodore VIC-20 recruited a marketing team and a small group of computer enthusiasts, and worked closely with colleagues in the UK and Japan to create colorful packaging, user manuals, and the first wave of software programs.

Commodore VIC-20 went through several variations in its three and a half years of production.

The rainbow logo Commodore VIC-20 was introduced in early 1983 and has the newer C64 keyboard with gray function keys and the Revision B motherboard.

Commodore VIC-20 was a bestselling computer, becoming the first personal computer to sell over a million.

In summer 1982, Commodore VIC-20 unveiled the a more advanced machine with of RAM and considerably improved sound and graphics.

Commodore VIC-20's BASIC is compatible with the PET's, and the Datasette format is the same.

The Commodore VIC-20 did not originally have a disk drive; the VIC-1540 disk drive was released in 1981.

Normally, the Commodore VIC-20 operates in high-resolution mode whereby each character is 8×8 pixels in size and uses one color.

Commodore VIC-20 did not include an RF modulator inside the computer's case because of FCC regulations.

Commodore VIC-20's RAM is expandable through the cartridge port via a RAM cartridge.

Since the Commodore VIC-20 was designed to use SRAM rather than DRAM, the system board has no provisions for DRAM refresh.

Unlike the PET, the VIC-20 does not include a machine language monitor, but Commodore offered them on disk, tape, or cartridge, with several different executables to load into various memory locations.