Added: 5 years ago
From: PsiKnife
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  • 300 bucks was a lot of money in 1983

  • PRESS PLAY ON TAPE......

    SINTAX ERROR......

  • this was my first computer. brings back a lot of memories

  • I paid $420.00 all taxes in! Paid the last bit with my quarters and dimes.....

  • Programming machine code on that is so awesome xD

  • Nice! I just picked up one of these that were chilling in a warehouse at work. The guy wouldn't accept any money from it. I'm keeping it in the box for 30 years and then maybe will consider selling it.

  • Probably those are the Enterprise's computers back then at the 60's, lol very advanced!

  • this was my first computer. brings back a lot of memories.

  • I had one in 1983 at Christmas. I had it for about 2 months before it broke down and I never saw it again. I think my mom got her money back, And had to wait another year before I got an Acorn BBC Model B

  • At $300 and connecting to a regular TV, it was just affordable for me as a kid.

  • Bloody heck, just under 300 dollars?! I wouldn't pay that for even todays consoles. wow, how times have changed!

  • @Blake4014 Well it's a computer not a console, factoring in inflation $300 sounds fairly normal

  • cool, when is this coming out?

  • @peacetoallofus It's coming out in 1980

  • I still have mine. And the code book too.

  • I can't wait!

  • "Ditto" with mlee2001! !! If Kirk says get, you get it! !!

  • If the Vic 20 was the wonder machine of the 80s, then what was the Amiga 500?.

  • @bazfanv2 The Amiga 500 came about 5 years or so after the Vic 20. Anyway the Atari ST was better.

  • Now, I know why I had to have one when I was a kid... The SHAT!!

    If Kirk says buy this computer, you danm well go and buy that computer!

  • That's awesome.

  • 0:00 Predator

  • Comment removed

  • god damn, those graphs were fuckin sweet, excel '81

  • I had gorf and omega race! Astounding graphics! It was just like being there. I remember my Vic. It took a half hour of programming to make a big heart appear on the screen. My wife didn't like it because she couldn't watch TV if I was using the computer...

  • I remember sitting for hours typing codes to make a tiny fart noise... oh the memories! LOL

  • @7greeneyedlady

    Yea, there fart noises were incredible.

  • Vic 20 was my 1st machine as a kid 12 years, as for the carts went, omega race, jelly monsters and adventures (space invaders) were amazing and caused some trouble with copy right infringment, i think by memory the code, graphic's was to close to the original. Still these carts made the vic 20 special and kinda brought the sensation of coin ops in your home.

  • I miss Omega Race

  • invest!

  • beam me up!!!

    

  • under 300 dollars.. damn

  • Damn !

  • Cool.

  • I still have 2 of them...working and all

  • haha 10 years later the i7 990x black edition would be over 50% less of its value then 20 years it be worth a lot more than what it's worth today.

  • Sold!!!

  • I'd rather have a Colecovision.

  • Commodore was king

  • Under $300?! XD That's actually kinda comedic at today's standards. Especially since $300 was worth a LOT more back then.

  • @Ashanmaril

    But look at the Vic's rivals at the time, and how much more they cost. The Apple II cost over a thousand bucks, and you needed to buy a monitor on top of that.

    The VIC was primitive in some ways, but it offered cheap computing to the masses with color and sound at a time when most cheaper machines were a single color, often had no sound etc.

    It was also intended to be a hybrid machine: half console, half computer.

  • What happened to Commodore computers?

  • @Mavericker7 They had a terrible sales managment and had to commit bankruptcy back in 1994. Still unbelivable for me, I had an Amiga 500+ in the early 90s. Great Home-Computer with many, many good games. Sadly, the firm ruined itself.

  • @Mavericker7 In 1994, they went bankrupt. The name passed around various companies, from Escom to Gateway, until nowadays, when it passed into the hands of someone who is now making X86 Linux PCs inside Commodore 64 and Vic-20 cases. Too bad. Commodore were the good kind of low-end computers. They didn't cost much, but they weren't cheaply made. They were great.

  • @TeamRocketReviews Yes I recall reading that somewhere about them going bankrupt. I recall C64s and Amigas were the most sophicated computers out in the '80s.

  • @Mavericker7

    They were. Sadly, Irving Gould, their financier, withdrew most of their research funding, and they floundered, watching as other better-funded rivals overtook them.

    It took until the early 90s for the PC to match the capabilities of the 1985 Amiga.

  • @KaitainCPS Was the Amiga in popular use in the early '90s? I know of a certain web cartoonist/animator who made some cartoons with an Amiga computer.

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  • @Mavericker7

    Depends who you ask. In Europe (especially the UK, Germany the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries), the Amiga was THE machine to have in the late 80s and early 90s. Its Heyday was around 1988-1992. The games market was huge, as was the demo scene. It was also used by artists and animators. Combined with the "Video Toaster" tech, it provided some of the earliest commercially viable cheap CGI facilities, and was used on the TV show Babylon 5.

  • @Mavericker7

    However, it never really sold especially well in North America. It's funny: while the Europeans were buying the two great 16-bit US home computers (the Amiga and the Atari ST), Americans were pretty much buying only Japanese dedicated games consoles (Nintendo and Sega) or 386/486 PCs for business. The bona fide "home computer" market faded away there, and didn't really return until PCs got both more powerful and cheaper, and then Apple re-emerged as a force in the consumer market.

  • @KaitainCPS I don't think they got as powerful as Amigas until around 1994-1995.

  • @TeamRocketReviews I can recall my dad was trying to get me a Commodore Amiga computer when I was young.

  • @Mavericker7

    The Amiga was a truly amazing machine...leagues ahead of anything else at the time of its release.

  • I wasn't going to get one until he told me that it has a real computer keyboard and plays great games too.

  • Pepsi gave these away at one time. You had to pull the rubber tabs and spell Vic 20. My mom won ;)

  • He said: HoLY SHIT!, for only less than $300 bucks XD

  • @aljones1966 that $300 in the 80's was like a thousand dollars now. you could buy a lot of stuff for a dollar back then. you hear people today say "oh it costs me like 400 dollars a month for groceries". back then it would cost 50-75 for a full fridge. no lie.

  • @helli3yte All depends on what you're buying. Televisions back in the early 1950's could cost $650. That would be like paying $5,000 today or more. Back in the early 1970's a small 5,000 BTU room air conditioner would set you back about $150. You can buy the same one or slightly more powerful for about $100.

  • ....I'll stick with the xbox...

  • My father worked on the original ENIAC computer project in the 1950s.

    He often talks excitedly about holding “convocations for a whole new spiritual realm” inside the rooms full of circuits & valves, where his team all used to gather, chant, cut open their veins and mix blood, urine & semen in their earnest “striving towards a new religion”.

    He feels that today’s industry has lost its way, that it’s all nothing but “narcissistic gadgets for brain-dead consumer drones”.

  • Uh... that's... William Shatner?

  • Whoa! COLOR SCREEN? ;O

  • First ever computer thanks for the memorie feel like a dinosaur now lol

  • The Wonder was how I believed any of those software packages on the back of the box were even usuable for anything...

  • @cobrachoppergirl you had basic interpreter, you had NO EXCUSES!

  • oh srry it was "under 320$"

  • 320$ ? did i hear well?

  • this was the first PC i ownded and i loved it!

  • Don't buy it, get a c64 miles better... I've got 2... Best retro gaming...

  • WIlliam Shattner tells me to buy this, fuck xbox360 and ps3!

  • i fucking want one.

  • Shatner's quite slim there.

  • OMG Bill!!!!

    

  • This was why my parents got me a VIC-20...  Captain Kirk.

  • Radar Rat Race was the shiznizzly. I think it was more with the tape deck. Our IBM 8080 and dotmatrix was $2500 (but that had the 40 meg MFM drive heh).

  • how much does a commondore cost today? in dollar?

  • Wow! Those video games are almost as good as the Crysis games that I play. LOL.

  • There is a NEW commodore on the market this may. 2GB DDR3 Memory, dual core intel processor, blueray/dvd. Same great look! Check it out! Commodore website. price: $595. Just like the original Commodore 64.

  • Lol, this is Linus' Torvalds (The creator of Linux) 1st computer! It shoul'd be famous!

  • My first computer, too. Remember signing in with "HELLO"?

  • Going from a C=64 with 1541, to a Mac SE with 17mb drive 60ms access drive, was a dream come true. 17mb harddrive = Nirvana. To hell with the Floppy shuffle, and an external drive and monitor! And finally, an OS that didn't suck ass like GEOS. Unfortunatly, at 8mghz, slow, until I expanded it with a 25mghz overclocked piggyback board.

  • @cobrachoppergirl

    Hilariously, the 1541 should have been 30 times faster on the 64 than it was. An engineering screw-up chopped off some of the bus lines, and the mistake couldn't be rectified in time to meet the shipping targets. So they just had to accept that it was going to ship with a pathetically slow drive. Engineer Bob Russell was absolutely furious. And it was really all caused by Jack Tramiel's silly decision to re-use the Vic-20 case, when the engineers wanted a slightly bigger one.

  • What sold the VIC-20 was the keyboard. No other computer out there had any kind of decent keyboard. That and you could hook it up to a TV, get color, and not have to buy and expensive monitor. Unfortuantly, take a look at the mobo, it was shoddily mass produced, the power brick and power connector jack had problems, and like the C=64 that followed it, it sorely lacked a DOS like the Apple II. On the plus side, with a DOS, it was instant on.

  • The VIC-20 was such a great value compared to the Atari 2600 and Intellivision. The Atari 2600 had worse graphics and never had a viable computer add on. The Intellivision had the ECS, but that made the Intellivision more expensive than the VIC-20 and you could still do more with the VIC-20 because it had better expandability than an Intellivision with the ECS. 

  • Try to run Crysis 2 on a Vic-20...

  • Wait .....was that screen in HD? lololol :)

  • The Vic-20 pretty much sucked and was obsolete in a year, the C-64 on the other hand rocked and there was like 10,000 titles for it, they kept producing software for into the 1990's. Then there was the C-128, it was suppose to better than the C-64, but software designers were reluctant to produce something that wouldn't run on the C-64 because of million already out there, so not much was made specifically for the 128.

  • @Dervrak The C-128 also died because it was released too late as the Amiga 1000 was released to close to it for the 128 to ever really be viable.

  • @Dervrak

    You're so wrong it's not even funny. The VIC-20 kicked ass all over everything that was out when it was released. It was originally developed as a video game console to go against the Atari and Intellivision it was made into a computer to appeal more to parents. The VIC-20 was better than both the Atari and Intellivision and was cheaper than every other home computer that was out when it was released. The VIC-20 was also the first home computer to break a million sales.

  • @Dervrak

    The VIC was a cheap machine, but it was sold at a price point that other companies couldn't match, so it sold millions of units and kept selling even in the first couple of years of the 64's life.

    The 64 was the real leap forwards, though, no two ways about it. That was a properly-designed engineering project. If you read Commodore's history you realize that the VIC was pretty much an accidental project, a pet project of Bob Yannes that Jack Tramiel discovered and liked.

  • I have a VIC-20 and I have Omega Race on cartridge. Sadly, one of my faveorite games mentioned there (Gorf [frog spelled backwards?]) I don't have the cartridge for. However I have a download of it. Yup, if you have a Win98 or lower machine, you can turn your PC into a 1541 floppy drive emulator (and the VIC won't know the difference). Just have to make a cable using 2 TTL chips to go from the parallel port on the PC to the serial floppy connector on the VIC! Also works on the 64!

  • @supertech2006

    Get a program called star commander. It works on any pc and you can read an actual 1541 disk drivewith it too.

  • My first computer too. Actually did machine code programming with it. Made a few whacky games too.

  • I say BURN Windows and Mac!!! And Burn Linux.. Only joking i mean burn only Windows and Mac. Keep Commodore as Commodore works. :-)

  • Wow ... this was my first computer :-)

  • Mr. Shatner, in that episode where you drown your wife ... why are you so fat?

  • But can it run Crysis?

  • @alahos Lol

  • @alahos no, but it can run black ops so damn smooth

  • I had a Commodore Vic-20 in 1983 and it was shite! The only good games were Blitz, Race, Hoppit and Arcadia, which was sort of like Space Invaders.

  • Great sweater

  • Commodore also brought us the greatness known as Impossible Mission.

  • He even chews the scenery in this commercial

  • Shatner's going to be at Megacon, and I wonder if he'd sign my Vic-20

  • WTF?! Under $300 =O My pc is $400 - wtf!

  • It was $300 in 1983.....when you adjust for inflation it cost more than $1200 more or less.

  • @civicnation4two So, in 2050 my PC will be about... $50?! Wow, that nuts!

  • prices for technology is always dropping. Ipad = $500 vs Vic20 @ $1200..........people always forget to adjust for inflation. There are people here talking about gold prices and how high it is but they always forget to adjust for inflation and if they did they'd realize gold prices back in 1985 $600 actually translates to be $2100 in todays prices - its a lame investment but people are dumb and i digress....sorry.

  • thirty years, and where are we? :)

  • HOLY DOG SHIT!

    Is GARF(?) out for PS3 yet?!

  • It has a real computer keyboard *cough* However only 6 keys are ever used in the process *cough*

  • I love how he can't seem to get the word "commodore" out of his mouth without forcing it.

  • WILLAM SHANTER SAYS THE VIC 20 KICKS ASS!

  • Thank God for NES or I would have never gotten into the video game fad!!

  • I feel so old right now... I had the Vic20, CBM64 and CMB128... cassette drives on up...

  • I miss the 80's. The world was much simpler and easier to please.

    Now where all just jaded and bored.

  • omg BringBackThe80's vic dragon i remember at wh smiths seeing this stuff, frogger,packman,centipede  wow Great posting thankyou for the memories

  • no thanks, i have a system with 3ghz, 4gb, 500gb hdd sata, and a 9800gt

  • Commodore = The Wave of the Future.

  • Remember loading up games with a cassette deck?! Epic :D

  • Man this brings back VERY fond memories, I had one of these babies and was a proud owner (Thanks Mom!)

  • Can you get HD vic 20's?

  • The "on fire" part is something about composite video.

  • 5 star awesomeness.... I use to play blackjack on one of these.... I was 8

  • With a whopping 4K of memory!!!!! Damn, my refrigerator has more than that!

  • @conradragzoff actually it has 5K...

  • @soldier501 it only had 3.6k i had 1 but ran out of memory all the time until i started sectionalizing my basic programs to run in a chain and using the load-programname- command to load up another section off the tape

  • @ghostman3331 3.5k free for basic, but totally 5KB.

  • @ghostman3331 Yeah, and now you own Microsoft.

  • @sjk72 no now i hack the world wide web using my brain i can hack anything including ur email address but i won your not worth it

  • @ghostman3331 Is that supposed to be a sentence?

  • @sjk72 all im saying the commodore vic 20 was my first computer now i got dell mark4 and the programmins the same but easier

  • @ghostman3331 Sounds like you not only don't know English very well, but also know nothing about computers.

  • What cost $300.00 in 1980 would cost about $800.00 in 2010... Would you have been happy with an $800 Vic 20? Consumers who purchased computers in the 70's and 80's were investment pioneers, indeed.

  • Yay it's only $300...

  • Atari can kiss our asses!

  • HaHaHaHaHa!! I had a Commodore Vic-20 and it used to take half an hour to load up the games from the Cassette player. Happy days though, takes me back to when I was 16.

  • Why on god dammit commercials the people doing things are just smiley silly?

  • You think that wasn't flash, what about the Microbee... a 'Stroin puta!

  • hehehe :-)))

  • where can ya get that moniter from

  • @CuzPBz It's called a TV. Look at a Garage Sale location near you!

  • @700PurpleYoshi thanx , anychance jb hi fi have them lol

  • Wow i cant wait til it comes out in Stores.

  • i'm going to install gta 4 on my vic-20! :D

  • I had a Vic20, I was around 9-10 years, it was awesome! Hard to imagine now, I know.

  • 300$ , omg ! : D

  • William Shatner plays WoW, On a Vic 20

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  • ROFLCOPTERRRRR... DURRRR... DURR... DURppPPPPP!

  • I have one still working, but can't find the cassettes !!!

  • LMAO KAHNmmodore

  • Shatner should redo the commercial when they do the comeback.

  • the kid isn't even looking at the screen

  •  Wow.......one game.

  • LMAO... I used to own one. My very first wannabe computer...

  • Theres . . . something on the computer... some... thing...

  • omg

    

  • lol, Don't buy an Atari, buy a Vic 20 so the whole family can learn computing at home. Oh, and it plays great games too ;-)

  • The Vic-20 opened the doors to the C-64. One thing about the Vic-20 was it had to use cartridge games, there were tape drive games, but the cartridges were far more popular: Adventure, in the cave what next; scream or yell, the parsers were simple and only one correct answer. I talked about Adventure, and I was treated as an alien from outerspace, Betelgeuse, as none had seen such a thing, they even thought my art was porn as I was so advance to see the move Alien and get Omni. Cowboys about.

  • Isn't it funny how the computers of the 80's (personally I had the C64 and an Amiga after that) were all advertised as these business / spreadsheet machines, with a slight side mention slipped in: "Psst, and it plays games too". It took a while before they realized that -games- would be item that sells those machines, not those silly and rudimentary (well, back then revolutionary, I guess) applications.

  • @awaken151 F@#$,I forgot all about that game!

  • @bulldogguy1994 I wouldn't have had the patience for that even then when I was 9 years old,let alone today's generation.

  • @landrykkb Another victim of ADD

  • @gtimandan Actually,Colecovision then was the next closest thing to the arcade experience.

  • @schmeckendeugler Not unless your parents were loaded with cash,you didn't have a monitor!

  • $300.00 for a Commodore Vic-20 would have been by far the better investment in 1982 because Atari,Intellivision,and Coleco Vision were all individually going for the same price,basically.

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  • Oh, the excitement and wonder of creating bar charts.

  • Great technology for 1980! I'm from Russia and there were no PC's in my country at the time.

  • William Shatner RULES!

  • @mrsoundtrack no he doesnt!

  • Wow I had one of these and nobody I know had ever heard of them.

  • Problem with these computer back in the 80's...was..the internet wasn't available to the general public yet...and in that time...the rage was Atari...so Commodore had to make their computers appealing by offering games. But all these computers were good for back then was writing very small programs...and in case you wanted to do your finances...and if you needed a very big calculator. Cause if you hear Shatner say..."invest" in this computer..cause they figured it would benefit in the long run

  • Oh my god,

    the vic20, my first computer.

    I have buy this device for 950DM in germany.

    i have good memories for this time.

  • @MAOSfoto

    When did personal computers appear in West Germany?