This VIC-20 was my main computer in college. I loved it. I did a LOT of programming with it. In fact the books I used to learn from are in this bundle.

The nice thing about them selling all the components separately, was that you didn't have to pay a lot of money up-front. I kept adding items as needed, not before. All the items themselves were aggressively budget-designed, which I really appreciated. The end-result, after years of adding on, was a really full-featured computer-system that could do everything I needed for half the cost of a contemporary Apple // or TRS-80 (or 1/10 the cost of a PC or Mac).

This whole bundle includes:

Manuals

Books

The VIC-20 was an amazing computer. I've been in the computer industry for over 30 years. I had computers before the VIC-20, and more computers than I could ever count after. Only the Mac has ever surpassed the VIC-20 in my heart. The VIC-20 was insanely inexpensive, capable and limited all at the same time. It had loads of personality because of this. It was quirky, but not in a bad way. It never had a single failure. It always just worked for me. And it worked a lot.

I really like the way that all the peripherals wired together in a SCSI-like daisy chain. The Commodore IEEE-488 Bus was basically a network for your devices. It was very simple to connect and you didn't have to fiddle with five different types of connectors. Frankly, it was much more refined than you would expect for a home system, especially an inexpensive one. Way ahead of its time and competitors.

I used the (weird handset-based, manual-dial 300 Baud) VIC Modem to call BBS boards (before the Internet was a thing) and to connect to the Rutgers University mainframe computers. I used the VicTerm cassette cartridge (included here) as the software to connect to those systems. The modem didn't have the ability to dial the phone. You had to dial the phone yourself, hear the screech of the answering computer's modem, and then unplug your phone's handset (!) and plug the coiled cord into the VIC Modem. It was crazy even for the time. Plus you were using a 300 Baud modem, when everyone else was on 1200 and 2400 bps ones. You could actually read along on the screen at just the right pace. The VIC Modem was an elegant weapon for a more civilized time.

I used the 1525 Graphic Printer to print out my papers for humanities classes. Our papers had to be "typed." My expository writing professor (in 1984) looked at the "dot-matrix" printed paper I had just handed in and said "Huh. I guess I'd better get used to this." Imagine how funny it would be if a student handed in a typewritten paper these days. Actually, maybe it's like vinyl and it's becoming a popular retro-chic thing to do. If you want to present a cooler, and more rare, paper, use this printer to make a real 1980s statement. Technically, the printer isn't actually a "dot-matrix," it's a "Uni-Hammer." Each dot is banged into the ribbon, one at a time. So it's very slow and loud. A single line took a couple passes to complete. But it worked fine. It was a very clever way to make the printer ridiculously affordable, and allowed a kid like me to buy it using paper route money.

When I first got the computer, I used the cassette drive to load and save programs. It was painful, but it worked pretty reliably, which was a shock. Compared to the nightmare of fiddling with the volume control on a TRS-80 deck, it was a huge relief. It was years before I could afford the fancy diskette drive.

When I got the 1541 disk drive it was such a luxury. Floppy drives were fast and reliable. Loading a program used to be a slow, cumbersome step required before you could work. With a disk drive that step became nearly invisible. Like everything they promised was "friendly," however...well that was just marketing. In DOS or UNIX, you can get a directory of a disk by typing DIR or ls. On a Commodore it was LOAD "$",8   Still, it was cool. You felt like a real engineer typing in such arcane jargon!

I didn't purchase many cartridges. I didn't buy games. They were expensive. I programmed them for myself. Therefore I only had three cartridges, and they're all here:

The switch I added to top-right of the keyboard isn't connected to anything any longer. I wired it in so that I could turn off the expansion cartridge without having to unplug it every time or use it as a "Hamster Reset" which was a popular hack at the time. I guess that adds to the historical authenticity of this computer.

I hope that some collector will find value or joy by purchasing this bit of history from the crazy Wild-West days of early 8-bit home computing. If you don't know about the colorful people at Commodore (and the other manufacturers) and the ridiculous amount of drama behind these plastic boxes, it's worth reading about. If you've ever seen the 2014 AMC TV series "Halt and Catch Fire," you'll recognize some of that drama fictionalized on screen. This computer was all part of that time and that era. They were all part of the formative days of our geek and hacker culture. They're literally historical artifacts. They belong in a museum. I look at these devices and they make me smile. I hope they can make someone else smile too.