The real holy grail of VIC collections

[orion70]

Take a look at this. How much would you like to have one in your collection?

[Mike]

Yes. I saw this thing mentioned in the current issue of Commodore Free Magazine.

Strange though, only two cables attached: one going to the datasette, and what is the other one supposed to do? Or is this just a keyboard?

And the portrayed character set is more reminiscent of the C64 (double-width lines) than the PET-like version of the VIC-20.

[Mayhem]

It would have been great to have had a photo like this for the last Vic20 article I wrote. But how I told it was pretty similar to the comment below the article, that the released Vic20 is much like the MOS version, but heavily modified and improved by the guys at Moorpark. Great to see the Moorpark proto finally though.

[ral-clan]

Oh my gosh I love that so much!

I love its similarity to a PET-2001, even though that is a less practical design than we actually got.

[buzbard]

Strange though, only two cables attached: one going to the datasette, and what is the other one supposed to do? Or is this just a keyboard?

Maybe it was similar to the Atari 5200 which had it's PSU attached to the TV switch box and fed power to the unit via the RF cable. Or maybe the unit ran on batteries like a lot of the TV video games of the time.

Imagine powering your VIC with batteries!

[Boray]

I like the black tape drive! Looks exactly like the vic-20 tape drive but differently colored.

[ral-clan]

I like the black tape drive! Looks exactly like the vic-20 tape drive but differently colored.

That's the standard PET computer datasette. I'm actually surprised you've never seen one before as they were stock equipment with every PET computer (sans the 2001) I've ever seen.
In fact, the first VIC-20 datasettes were just white versions of these, before they switched to the more rounded versions.

[Boray]

I thought the pet tape drive was built in. And no, I've never seen a Pet in real life what I'm aware of.

[beamrider]

The built-in ones were the Pet models with the flat keyboards. The ones with proper keyboards had the black datasette. We had some 4032's at school with the seperate datasette.

[beamrider]

http://oldcomputers.net/pet2001.html

http://oldcomputers.net/pet4032.html