Commodore VIC-20

The VIC-20, released in 1980, was Commodore's deliberate push to make a computer cheap enough for a mass audience, and it succeeded in historic fashion by becoming the first computer of any kind to sell more than a million units. Jack Tramiel's philosophy of computers for the masses, not the classes, found its first great expression here, with a friendly machine sold through the same retail channels as toys and games.

The hardware was modest even by the standards of the day. It offered a small amount of memory, a low-resolution display with a limited number of on-screen characters, and a single video chip, the VIC, that gave the machine its name. Yet its full-size keyboard, color graphics, and sound made it a genuine and approachable computer at a price that undercut nearly everything else. Commodore even enlisted actor William Shatner as its pitchman, asking why buy just a video game.

As a gaming platform the VIC-20 relied heavily on cartridges to work around its tight memory, and it received a steady stream of arcade-style titles, including ports of Commodore's own coin-op catalog and clones of the era's arcade hits. It was the machine on which many players and future developers, including a young generation who would later build careers in software, first learned to write code from the type-in listings that filled magazines.

Commercially it was a triumph that established Commodore as a home computer powerhouse and funded the development of its successor. That successor, the Commodore 64, proved to be the VIC-20's undoing: launched barely two years later and vastly more capable at a competitive price, the 64 rapidly cannibalized VIC-20 sales, and Commodore discontinued the older machine in 1985.

The VIC-20's place in history is as the trailblazer that proved a real computer could be a mass-market consumer product. It opened the door that the Commodore 64 would then walk through, and for millions it was the first machine that made computing, and computer gaming, feel truly attainable.