Programming on the Vic 20

[badinsults]

How many people used to play around on the Vic 20 and make simple programs using Microsoft Basic. Remember peek and poke? The best were some of the examples used, like Tank vs UFO, which was pretty awesome. It was my first experience with programming, which I still do today. Commadore threw out some great user friendly manuals for programming. I was pretty young though, and never fully got into it, probably because the Vic 20 took up precious NES time.

[ubikuberalles]

In 1981 or 1982 (I don't remember) my dad brought home a VIC-20 he borrowed from a business partner. He knew I was a big computer nerd and thought I'd enjoy it even for a short time. Boy did I ever enjoy it! This was before I bought my Atari 400 and the VIC-20 was a vast improvement over my current computer (an 1802 COSMAC ELF). The computer didn't have a disk drive or even a cassette player and so any program I wrote would be wiped out as soon as I turned it off. I quickly reviewed the Basic manual that came with the computer and wrote a couple of my own graphic demo programs. It was a lot of fun and I learned a lot about graphic programming on an 8-bit machine. I even seriously thought about getting my own VIC-20 but, when I finally had the money, decided on an Atari 400. Alas, those programs are long gone. I didn't even keep the notes I used when I developed the code.

When I first got my Atari 400 I was in the same predicament: no way to store my programs. I did, however, have a camera handy and took pictures of some of my demo programs:

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v453/ubikuberalles/blogstuff/new-scanner/new-scanner03.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v453/ubikuberalles/blogstuff/new-scanner/new-scanner04.jpg

They're only B+W photos but I think you get the jist of it. It was all simple stuff but fun to play with and very satisfying.

I never saved those programs to disk or tape. By the time I got a data tape recorder for my Atari, I had moved on to more sophisticated - and less graphic - computer programming on my Atari.

Ah, good times, good times. :)

[Dave Farquhar]

I'm just a little too young for the VIC--we got our first computer in 1983 or 1984--it was a C-64. But the VIC and the 64 had the same BASIC, just a different memory map and different video and sound chips, so most of the PEEKs and POKEs weren't portable. But you're right, Commodore's manuals provided an outstanding introduction to programming. Their magazine was awfully good too. I was sorry when they pulled the plug on that. Commodore sure did introduce an awful lot of people to computing.