The living room of a flat in Hanover on a Sunday afternoon in November, on a low tiled coffee table before a dark oak wall unit a long flat home computer in off-white plastic with a rounded front edge and five fine grooves along the back, a small red lamp glowing, dark brown keys and four tall keys in a separate block at the right, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, beside it a cream cassette recorder with black piano keys, a coiled cable running to a wooden television set, a child's hand on the keys, plates of crumb cake pushed aside, grey daylight through net curtains.
What it was used for
Commodore's colour computer for the living room, sold in Germany from October 1981 as the VC-20 for 899 marks. It had already appeared in Japan in October 1980 as the VIC-1001 and in the United States from May 1981. Inside was a MOS 6502; colour came from the MOS 6560 with 8 foreground and 8 background colours, and BASIC was built in. The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum gives 1.5 kilobytes of freely usable memory. Advertisements called it the friendly computer, and the actor William Shatner appeared in the television campaign.
What was new
What stands out is not the technology but the price point: colour on a television and built-in BASIC for 899 marks. In Germany VIC became VC; the HNF calls it the "VolksComputer", while the Centre for Computing History gives as the reason the avoidance of an ambiguous pronunciation. The barb is in the figures: behind the people's name stood, on the HNF's figure, 1.5 kilobytes of freely usable memory. By the end of production in 1985 Commodore had sold 2.5 million; the Centre for Computing History calls it the first computer to pass 1 million.
What the sources leave open: The memory figures count different things: the Centre for Computing History gives 5 KB of RAM, the HNF 1.5 KB of freely usable memory. On market entry the HNF gives October 1981 for Germany and May 1981 for the USA; the Centre for Computing History gives only the year 1981 for the USA and Europe. The HNF puts the end of production in 1985, museum-digital in 1984. The 899 mark price appears only at the HNF.