Thank you for your email.
Yes, I'm quite familiar with the VIC-20 cartridge. It's origin was in a
chip I developed as a drop-in addition product for the PET/SuperPet. I
did much of the development of the product. It was sold (primarily to
the enthusiast & high-school teacher market) as a ROM chip and language
manual. It came with instructions on how to insert the chip into one's
computer. We distributed several versions of it, which varied only on
which ROM slot they were destined for (different versions of the PET had
different 4K ROM slots available).
Technically, the VIC-20 product is equivalent to the original chip
product. When the VIC-20 came along, it provided a much more convenient
packaging opportunity -- no more "opening the hood" of your PET! Simply
plug in the cartridge, like any other game cartridge and boom -- a new
version of BASIC.
I wasn't personally involved with the development of the packaging for
the VIC-20 cartridge. That was handled by Waterloo Computing Systems
Ltd, (WCS) which was a spin-off from our group at the University of
Waterloo (and in which I was a shareholder). WCS looked after the
commercialization of stuff that came out of our research lab.
Actually, if you look at the website for the Barrie Computer Museum, at
page:
http://www.pcmuseum.ca/details.asp?id=880&type=software
you'll see that I added a comment there seven years ago (in 2010). I
don't know offhand if the Waterloo Computer Museum has a copy of the
cartridge (or a VIC-20 for that matter), but they are always happy to
receive Waterloo-related technology.
FYI when the Commodore 64 came along, which also had plug-in cartridge
capabilities, WCS (which was called WatCom by then) created cartridges
for BASIC (albeit not simply an extension of the existing BASIC -- it
was a whole new and different language). I was not involved with that
at all. I was however the principal author of the C64 WatCom Pascal
cartridge that provided a Pascal interpreter for the C64.
Regards,
-trg