The Wonder Computer of My 1980s

When I was a kid, my parents gave me a black-and-white TV. Then, at some point, they quietly took it back.

A little while later it reappeared — same TV, but now with a Commodore VIC-20 wired to it. They’d repurposed our old set into a monitor and gifted the whole thing back to me as my first computer. To a kid, it might as well have been a spaceship.

I had no idea what I was holding. The VIC-20 came out in 1981 for $299.95 — the first color computer you could buy for under three hundred bucks. Commodore’s founder, Jack Tramiel, had a line I didn’t know at the time but that the machine completely lived up to: “computers for the masses, not the classes.” They even hired William Shatner to sell it. Captain Kirk himself, leaning into the camera, calling it “the wonder computer of the 1980s” and asking, “Why buy just a video game?”

It worked. The VIC-20 became the first computer in history to sell a million units — and it did it in a single year.

Mine had a cartridge slot and a tape drive — the Datasette — which loaded programs off ordinary cassettes with a screech like a fax machine having a rough morning. And it had five kilobytes of memory. Not gigabytes. Kilobytes. You could fit maybe a page or two of text in the entire machine.

I had a handful of cartridge games, though I’ve lost most of their names to time. There was a tank game — I can still picture it — crawling across a landscape, blasting enemy tanks and the occasional flying saucer. (I’m fairly sure it was Tank Atak.) The joystick, the blocky explosions, the way a whole afternoon could disappear into it.

But the games aren’t actually what stuck.

The VIC-20 booted straight into BASIC. You turned it on and it just sat there — a blinking cursor, waiting for you to tell it what to do. So I did. I typed in programs out of magazines and books, made the screen fill with my name, made it count, made it play little tunes. Half of it I barely understood. Some of it I broke on purpose, just to see what would happen.

That was the moment, though I didn’t know it then. That blinking cursor is where it all started for me. Thirty-something years of networking, security, and solution architecture — a whole career — traces back to a repurposed TV and 5K of RAM.

I never did graduate to the Commodore 64. That machine was way too sophisticated for me. (I’ve since made my peace with more than five kilobytes of memory.)

Here’s the fact that still gets me, though. That same little machine was also the first computer of a Finnish kid named Linus Torvalds — who grew up to write Linux, which now quietly runs most of the internet.

Same wonder computer. Funny where a blinking cursor can take you.