Commodore


Commodore VIC-20 - 1981

I have to admit here that I never got very excited over the Commodore computers. There was absolutely nothing wrong with them, they were extremely well made with possibly the best sound chip and a graphics chip which offered sprites (movable graphic blocks) making games very slick. Their BASIC was nothing special, being based on Microsoft BASIC (most people will be unaware that Microsoft started with a version of BASIC you could pay to install on your new computer). It came with 5KB of memory which was not bad for its day and upgradeable to 32KB. It had a very unusual screen of 23 rows and 22 columns so text looked a bit stretched. The keyboard was very high quality and it was a very easy computer to work with. Possibly due to the rather ordinary BASIC and the very lavish sound and graphics capability, it was seen as a very fine gaming computer.