The VIC-20 was
a great success for Commodore. It was marketed as the
" Friendly Computer " in ads
featuring William Shatner of Star Trek. It followed the
successful PET series of computers and
was the first computer to crack the $300 dollar barrier
for a color computer. This was a remarkable feat in
the early 80's, most color computers were expensive and
beyond the reach of the average household. Many parents
were being bombarded with the propaganda of the need to
expose their children to computers or face the
possibility of having ' little
Johnny ' fall behind his piers at school and
wind up an outcast in society. Jack Tramiel saw this gap
in the market and targeted the VIC-20 at
it.
Commodore was in a unique position at the time because
it not only built it's own computers it made the chips
that were inside to. This gave Commodore a great
advantage over other computer manufacturers. Jack could
undersell his competition and capture a larger market
share. The VIC-20 was so popular,
because it filled a need, it was cheap enough so that the
wary parents could afford to jump into an unknown arena
without taking a second mortgage on the house yet it was
a real computer, capable of any function ( with the right
peripheral add on! ) that the more expensive computers
were claiming. It became the first computer to sell 1
million units, this was partly due to Jack Tramiel's
marketing philosophy of bypassing the computer specialty
stores and selling through mass marketers such as Kmarts
and Toys-R-Us toy stores, a carry over from the marketing
strategy developed for the PET
computers
and in line with the now famous phrase coined by Jack
" Computers for the masses, not the classes
".
Although this practice put Commodore into disfavor
with the established computer community of retailers, it
worked well with the public in general putting millions
of Commodore computers into the average household
worldwide. It really had no competition in the low-end
home market at that time.
The VIC-20's chief rivals were the
Timex/Sinclair ZX-81 (my first computer
:) no sound and no color), the TI99/4A
(an exceptional machine, but poor marketing and a failure
to allow 3rd party development doomed it.), the TRS-80,
a popular line of computers with the business community
but missed the mark in the home market with the release
of it's color version (poor color and expensive).
The only real competition was the Atari
400
it was actually around for a few years before the VIC
but due to a poorly designed keyboard, (it was a membrane
keypad type like the ZX-81), and it had
the unfortunate stigma of being considered an expensive
game machine. Probably due to in part the company name (
Atari was most known for its 2600
VCS game
console ) and at the time it was released it was pitted
against well established competition such as the Apple II, PET, and
TRS-80
business and educational series of computers.
But the fact that Jack Tramiel was legendary at
marketing gave the VIC-20 a great
advantage at this time. By the time the competition
reacted to the VIC-20 it was to late.
The prices on the C64 were beginning to
drop and the consumer's interest turned to the more
powerful machine.
Rumor has it that the VIC-20 was one
of the primary stumbling blocks for the Japanese in
trying to gain a foothold in the American computer
market. It is said that Jack took the VIC
over to Japan and sold it in a hostile market. The
Japanese, who were at this time preparing an assault to
capture the American computer market the same way they
had done in previous markets, (cars, consumer
electronics, cameras, ect....) were shocked by the VIC-20
and how low it was priced. They delayed there entry into
the American market to reassess there marketing strategy
and this bought time for the American manufacturers to
strengthen their own positions. Thus locking the Japanese
out of the American market. The great Japanese invasion
of the home computer market never happened partly due to Jack Tramiel's
VIC-20.
The VIC-20 was my 2nd computer, I
bought it on September 11, 1982. When the price dropped
below $200 in the summer of 1982, I new it was time to
move up to a more powerful computer. I had been using a ZX-81
with 16k of RAM
for about 3 months and now was looking
for a computer that I could get sound and color from.
I wanted the new kid on the block, the
C64,
just released earlier that year, but I couldn't afford
the $595 price tag and buy all the peripherals needed to
make it useful. I saw in the VIC an
opportunity to get a computer that I could afford with
color and sound. It also was compatible with the
peripherals that I would need when the C64
came down in price.
Although this is not the original computer I used in
1982 it brings back fond memories of many a late night
typing in programs from Compute! magazines and debugging
them for the next few days. I had it hooked to the living
room TV and used a VIC-1530 Datassette
to save my programs.
