when did the commodore vic 20 come out
in 1980
title: Commodore VIC-20 text: Commodore VIC-20 The VIC-20 (in Germany, VC-20; in Japan, VIC-1001) is an 8-bit home computer that was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three years after Commodore's first personal computer, the PET. The VIC-20 was the first computer of any description to sell one million units. The VIC-20 has been described as "one of the first anti-spectatorial, non-esoteric computers by design...no longer relegated to hobbyist/enthusiasts or those with money, the computer Commodore developed was the computer of the future." The VIC-20 was intended to be more economical than the PET computer. It was equipped title: Commodore VIC-20 text: improved sound and graphics capabilities. Sales were slow at first due to reliability problems and lack of software, but by the middle of 1983, the latter had turned into a flood and VIC-20 sales abruptly plunged. It was quietly discontinued in January 1985; by mid-1983 the computer had become widely available for under $90. Perhaps the last new commercially available VIC-20 peripheral was the VIC-Talker, a speech synthesizer; "Ahoy!" in January 1986 wrote when discussing it, "Believe it or not, a new VIC accessory ... We were as surprised as you". The VIC-20's BASIC is compatible with the PET's, except title: Commodore VIC-20 text: to 48 KB of the memory and to the 80-column video mode. As the latter type of cartridges, marketed primarily in Germany, were not released until late 1984—two years after the appearance of the more capable C64—they went by mostly unnoticed. Describing it as "an astounding machine for the price", "Compute!" in 1981 expected that the VIC-20 would be popular in classrooms and homes with small children, with "excellent graphic and sound capabilities". While predicting that the 22-column screen was "too small to support any but the most rudimentary business applications" the magazine observed that "at a price of $299, title: Commodore VIC-20 text: more powerful platforms, became available for the VIC-20 in 2013. The VIC-20 was called "VC-20" in Germany because the pronunciation of "VIC" with a German accent as well as its codename "Vixen" both sound like German curse words. The term "VC" was marketed as though it was an abbreviation of "VolksComputer" ("people's computer", similar to Volkswagen, Volksempfänger etc.) "BYTE" in 1983 published a series of technical articles about the VIC-20: Commodore VIC-20 The VIC-20 (in Germany, VC-20; in Japan, VIC-1001) is an 8-bit home computer that was sold by Commodore Business Machines. The VIC-20 was announced in 1980, roughly three title: Commodore VIC-20 text: circuits to the experimenter. The BASIC language could then be used (using the PEEK and POKE commands) to perform data acquisition from temperature sensors, control robotic stepper motors, etc. The VIC-20 did not originally have a disk drive, but an extremely reliable digital tape storage system (using audio cassette tapes); the VIC-1540 disk drive was released in 1981. Recent software releases such as clones of "Frogger" (2007 release) and "Berzerk" (2010 release) have gameplay, graphics, and sound (including voice synthesis in "Berzerk") that are comparable to the original arcade machines. A port of "Doom", a 1993 game popularized on much