Why was the Commodore VIC 20 such a fabulous computer to learn to program?
When you look back at the release of the VIC 20 in 1981 the word computer wasn’t in the vocabulary of the average person. Outside of a few lucky school kids, no one had a computer. And yes I realise that the VIC 20 wasn’t the first home computer. It came about four years after the trinity (TRS80, Apple II, and Commodores own PET) responsible for starting the home computer industry.
The VIC started life known as the “The friendly computer”, and sold in large department stores and Toy retailers. It was going head to head with Atari’s home console the VCS.
The VIC 20 didn’t look intimidating; it came in a small box and was extremely easy to set up and connect to your colour home TV. All the peripherals plugged in, by that I plugged the datasette and joystick and a cartridge game or two without any struggle.
But none of these made it easy to learn to program, although they certainly help to sell the VIC 20 into millions of households around the world.
What made the VIC such a great machine to learn to program on was the attention to detail that went into the quality manual that came with the computer. Early home computers all came with manuals, some easy to read and others not so easy but the ones that come with the VIC 20 targeted the novice, and this wasn’t so true of many others.
Staring at page one, the authors went into great detail to make the guide easy to understand, simple, clean text and lovely simple drawings to help bring things to your attention.
Within minutes you were typing BASIC code and seeing your creations come to life right there on your colour TV.
The manual was broken into chapters, which progressively tackled harder topics such as graphics, sound, and advanced strings and variables.
Day after day, you would type, list (often correct your typos) and then run your creations. Each step of the way you were growing your knowledge, improving your typing and getting a greater overall understanding of what this fantastic little machine could do.
And then came the day that you finished working your way through the manual, the friendly computer guide and you set about sourcing the VIC 20 Programmers Reference Guide. Another Commodore published book which was just as easy to follow and as clean and easy to understand as the basic guide you’d already worked through but with even more in-depth information, advance graphics and sound and then for the brave some 6502 assembly.
To help cement your knowledge, Commodore released a couple of additional products, Introduction to Basic volumes 1 and 2. With dozens of example programs accompanied by text and flowcharts, they did try to get the reader to understand how to program correctly.
While many computers followed, even more from Commodore itself, none captured the easy, friendly ground-up design of the VIC.