I did lawn and garden work and saved all summer to get my first VIC-20. Still needed a little help from my folks, but it was well worth it. Originally, I was thinking of an Atari 2600, like other kids had. My dad was glad to see me get a real computer instead of just a video game. For me, the VIC-20 had better graphics and played much better games than the Atari 2600 or TI 99/4a. To this day, there are some games I think are best played on a VIC-20, even compared to the C-64.
Learning to program was not an original priority of mine, but when Cosmic Cruncher and Omega Race got too frustrating it gave me something new to focus my attention on. It was all new to me and the only source I had to learn from was the VIC-20 Users Guide. It turned out that the UG was easy to learn from and in a few hours I was writing my own experimental programs. When I was ready for more, new books followed like the VIC-20 Programmer's Reference Guide and some generic BASIC books. I sincerely believe that the "Friendly Computer" User's Guide is the best BASIC programming book I ever read because it was so easy to learn from.
After I began actually trying to write useful programs, it wasn't long before I had exhausted the 2k RAM of the VIC. The C-64 was big news in all the Commodore magazines in 1983 (I think) and that Christmas, one showed up under my tree. Wow, 64 kilobytes of RAM! Sprites were really cool and I loved the Christmas Demo program Commodore distributed to the K-marts and other chain-stores with the new C-64's! It would be a long time before I ever saw the "OUT OF MEMORY" error message again ;)
I still program on the C-64 and C-128 in 64-mode, but now mostly in assembly language. I mess around with PCs, Apples and any other computers I can get my hands on but none have the same appeal as the C-64. I've never wanted to give up on the C-64 even though there was alot of pressure on me to for several years. I guess I just don't feel like I've exhausted its capabilities, and with an REU, SuperCPU and RAMLink now on my C-128D the possibilities seem inexhaustible! With a whopping total of about 34.25 Megabytes of RAM, I don't think I have to worry about running out of memory anymore!
Some of my Commodore books
