Monday, August 20, 2018

Introducing The Friendly Computer!

When Commodore introduced the VIC-20 they called it The Friendly Computer.  This is probably more because of the manual they included with it than because of anything else.  The book was really easy to understand.


Here is my own VIC-20.  This is an early one, with the squared off keys and the two-prong power plug.  I've got it plugged into a Sylvania TV using an RF modulator.

If you look closely at the screen it reports CBM BASIC V2, and 3583 BYTES FREE.  The computer comes with 5K RAM, but it uses some of that to map the screen, and some more for managing the BASIC interpreter.  If they had thought to provide 8K RAM this would have doubled the amount the programmer has access to.  This would have made the VIC-20 a lot more powerful.

Nowadays people wonder how anything could every be written with only 3.5K RAM, but we were so used to this back then.  You might be surprised how much can be done with a little ingenuity.  As a comparison, the original Atari 2600 VCS game console had only 128 bytes of RAM.  The VIC-20 has 28 times more RAM!  In addition, you could plug a RAM expansion cartridge into the VIC-20 to add more RAM.  Commodore made several sizes up to 16K RAM, and other companies made bigger ones.

I also have a Commodore C2N cassette drive.  I also had one of these in the 80's.  I have been using the tape drive to save some small programs.  This is nothing like a floppy drive, but you can save programs by name, and it sure beats retyping in programs every time you want to use them.

I also have a Commodore 1571 floppy drive.  These are great, but they don't make it possible to send and received programs to and from other people on the Internet because the disks have a format that can't be read on Macs or PCs.  I want to share what I'm doing, so I have purchased a kit to build my own SD flash memory adapter that will behave like a floppy drive and also let me use the SD card to copy files to other computers so I can share with others.  I'm very excited about that and I'll blog about it also.

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