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Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Tech The Wonder Computer of the 1980s

Posted by Paul Constant on Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 10:07 AM

Say what you will about conservative blog The Corner—lord knows I have—but every once in a while King Conservageek Jonah Goldberg tosses up an amazing bit of nerdbait. Case in point: William Shatner's commercial for the Commodore VIC-20. "Unlike games, it has a real computer keyboard!"

He also posted Microworld, a Shatner-hosted documentary about how microchips are the wave of the future.

Comments (7) RSS

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I wonder what it sells for these days?

Posted by Vince on March 29, 2011 at 10:15 AM

Hahahaha.

A Commodore Vic-20 was my first computer. I tossed it as soon as the Commodore 64 came out.

*sigh* I'm old.

Posted by Reverse Polarity on March 29, 2011 at 11:18 AM

Commodore's Amiga (also from the 80's) kicked the living crap out of all the others, and was still cheap. Took years for PCs to better the video capabilities. Brilliant engineering went into that marvel. Seriously.

Posted by Karlheinz Arschbomber

on March 29, 2011 at 12:32 PM

My first computer was Dr. NIM.

Posted by rob!

on March 29, 2011 at 1:06 PM

@3 yeah...the Amiga was way ahead of its time! But don't forget the Atari ST series, too. My roommate had the MagicSack emulator mod cart for his so we could run it as a MacPlus. With an old 2600 joystick instead of a mouse.

And how about first-person-shooter multi-player MIDI-protocol network games? The only drag was translating the German manual.

Oh crap, I just outed myself.

Posted by Mr. Happy Sunshine on March 29, 2011 at 1:40 PM

i had forgetten these, we had gambled wrong and gotten the odessey cause it had a key board . three weeks later the dog ate the controller wires , and put it out of action . my dad never bought another computer , i had to build a timex sinclair from a kit to get one . o the marvel of the 16k memory modual was something to behold . god , i'm old too aren't i ?

Posted by whatsbeckgottadowithit on March 29, 2011 at 3:32 PM

I'm annoyed that it cost less than an iPad does. I'm used to looking at how much cheaper macs are (no more $4000 systems) and thinking of computers as significantly cheaper nowadays.

Posted by Canadian Nurse on March 30, 2011 at 7:20 AM