My brother bought a Vic-20 in 1982. In 1987 when my friends started to get home computers, I bought the Vic-20 from my brother.
1987: The Vic-20 was considered really uncool. The C64 was cool. The Vic-20 was just totally obsolete.
2013: The Vic-20 is retro! It's even more retro than the C64 as the Vic20 is older and more original. The C64 was just a second version of the Vic-20.
1987: I used a black and white TV set. Because of the 50Hz PAL system, the image was flickering.
2013: I use my Vic-20 with a modern LED TV. I've got colors (of course), different zooming modes suitable for different games. Zooming on the standard Vic screen size is perfect use of the widescreen format and the picture is totally stable/no flickering.
1987: I used a datasette (tape drive) as my only storage device. Loading an 8K program took about 3 minutes.
2013: I use a SD2IEC with a 4GB SD card. Loading an 8K program takes 1.3 seconds (with SJLOAD). The card can store about half a million Vic-20 games which seems more than enough.
1987: I had 16K of expansion ram. I frequently had to unplug it and set the dip switches to be able to load different things.
2013: With a fully expanded vic I never have to unpug anything any more. My vic-menu program unexpands the computer automatically when loading an unexpanded program. With a reset button and some other switches at hand, I don't even have to turn the vic off.
1987: I already had a lot of software, and that was lucky because during one year, I only manage to get hold of new vic-20 programs twice!
2013: Now I can meet fellow Vic-20 users on the internet on a daily basis through discussion boards. And most Vic-20 software ever released is available on the net. It's just to put it on the SD card and it's ready for the Vic.
1987: Vic-20 was my only computer and it was reasonably powerful compared to what others had. It was even faster than the c64 (even though I didn't know this at the time).
2013: The vic-20 is a dinosaur compared to my main computer. You can for example emulate a Vic-20 very well, or a bunch of them simultaneously. Today's computers are amazing. But the Vic-20 will survive them too! Who will use a dual core running Windows 7 30 years from now because the fun of it? Nobody I think. The Vic 20 is for us what a steam engine is for a train fan. Modern computers also offers new development tools for the Vic-20. But I think it's more fun to do things on the Vic-20 directly. This post was written on a Vic-20! (Using Write Now and my WN2ASCII converter program). Now let's save this to the SD card and get on with it. Using a Vic-20 has never been better. Bye from Boray's Vic.
