Post by c64stuff on Oct 23, 2022 0:48:39 GMT
The Vic20 was a bit before my time, but I do vaguely remember it being still sold in stores and on display around the time the C64 was coming out. And since it shares many things from the Pet which in turn made their way to the C64 as well such as Petsci graphics and certain cross platform hardware compatible interfaces, that little computer has always held an interest to me.
The Vic20 in fact was the first computer ever to sell over a million units, and even though it came out several years after the Apple II line, it quickly surpassed it in total units sold. Commodore did everything right at that place in time in terms or available technology in making the Vic20, except that they severely hampered the Vic20 by only giving it 5K of ram.
If they simply would have given it 16K it would have resulted in much better software and opened up the machine to not only home computing but also business and school or science use as a viable option to apple at a fraction of the price. Because it only had 5K, almost all games released for it were on cartridge so they could use a full 8 or 16k of Rom for games. And those games were pretty good in it's time.
But giving it more ram from the factory so people could load bigger games on cheaper cassette tapes would have also severely cut into Atari 2600, Intelivision, and Colecovision sales, because parents would have opted more for a home computer with keyboard over a game console for education purposes and the kid wouldn't have tried to talk them out of it because the gaming library for the Vic20 with 16k of ram stock would have been bigger and better than anything on the market including gaming consoles at a fraction of a price for a cassette tape versus buying a ROM cartridge for the Vic20 or those gaming consoles that existed at the same time. Don't forget too the Vic20's graphics and sound were pretty much better than anything out there too, if you had the RAM to take advantage of it.
The Vic20 in fact was the first computer ever to sell over a million units, and even though it came out several years after the Apple II line, it quickly surpassed it in total units sold. Commodore did everything right at that place in time in terms or available technology in making the Vic20, except that they severely hampered the Vic20 by only giving it 5K of ram.
If they simply would have given it 16K it would have resulted in much better software and opened up the machine to not only home computing but also business and school or science use as a viable option to apple at a fraction of the price. Because it only had 5K, almost all games released for it were on cartridge so they could use a full 8 or 16k of Rom for games. And those games were pretty good in it's time.
But giving it more ram from the factory so people could load bigger games on cheaper cassette tapes would have also severely cut into Atari 2600, Intelivision, and Colecovision sales, because parents would have opted more for a home computer with keyboard over a game console for education purposes and the kid wouldn't have tried to talk them out of it because the gaming library for the Vic20 with 16k of ram stock would have been bigger and better than anything on the market including gaming consoles at a fraction of a price for a cassette tape versus buying a ROM cartridge for the Vic20 or those gaming consoles that existed at the same time. Don't forget too the Vic20's graphics and sound were pretty much better than anything out there too, if you had the RAM to take advantage of it.
