The VIC-20 shipped in 1980 as Commodore's first real home computer and William Shatner spent 1981 telling people on TV to buy one. It worked. The VIC crossed a million units in 1982 — nothing else at the price had done that — and bought Commodore the runway to ship the C64 later the same year.

The machine itself is almost comically constrained by modern standards. A stock VIC has 5 KB of RAM, of which 3.5 KB is usable for BASIC, and 22 columns of text. What it also has is a cartridge slot and an expansion port, which is how anyone did anything serious with it: 3K, 8K, 16K, and 24K RAM packs plugged straight into the back and nearly all the better software assumed you had one.

Specs:

• MOS 6502 at around 1 MHz (PAL varies) — the same CPU as the Apple II and Atari 800
• 5 KB RAM stock, 3.5 KB free to BASIC, typically extended to 8 KB or more with a cart
• VIC chip — not VIC-II — handles 16 colors at 176x184 and sound through four channels
• Cartridge slot and user port — both mandatory for anything past BASIC experiments

What people do with them now: the VIC-20 homebrew scene is small but consistently good. The Sheepover, Pulse, and Omega Fury are the kind of late-era releases that push what the hardware can do. The cartridge format is ideal for a homebrew scene because it skips the slow cassette/disk loading the C64 scene has to work around.

Buying one is easy. VICs are everywhere on eBay — $40–120 for a tested unit. The hard part is expansion: plan on an 8K cart at minimum, and something like a Mega-Cart or Penultimate+ if you want to run the full modern software catalog from a single device.

Emulate with VICE — the VIC-20 core has been in VICE since the beginning and is accurate down to the NTSC/PAL color differences. Drop into the VIC-20 forum when you hit something weird.