My introduction to VIC
by Leonard Tramiel
VIC concept computer at Chicago summer CES 1980. Photo by John Feagans.
As mentioned in another one of these posts, I was asked by my dad to give him my opinion of going along with Chuck Peddle’s idea for a computer. Shortly after working in the team that developed that machine from idea to fully working prototype I left Commodore to further my education. While in my apartment in New York City I got a call from Dad asking me to do the same thing again. One of the engineers at MOS Technologies had made a demo to show what could be done with one of their chips. It was going to be displayed at CES in Chicago and dad wanted me there to see it and tell him what I thought.
I went to Chicago, to the all too familiar environment of a trade show. I had been regularly going to these shows since I was about 12. Often giving demos of Commodore’s calculators to the throngs of people in attendance. The show was like all the others, but instead of spending my time in the public areas of the Commodore booth as normally would, I was usually in one of the interior meeting “rooms”. On a table was a small box, it had a original PET “chiclet” keyboard on top that largely determined its size, and it was connected to a TV. Using the character set that I had developed it was drawing mazes or showing animations of spacecraft flying across the screen like I had programmed a PET to do. But this was different in two very important ways. First, the images were not being displayed on a built-in monitor. They were on a standard TV. Next, and far more important, they were in color! That difference was so dramatic that it took a while before I noticed that the aspect ratio of the characters was quite different than on a PET. This was due to the significantly lower resolution that this system had for its display. The original PET was 40x25 character blocks. This machine was 22x23 characters in about the same screen ratio so the characters were almost twice as wide as they were tall.
I don’t remember most of the people that were in that room or the more impromptu meetings at a nearby café. But one of the things about this meeting “room” is that the walls was separated it from the public areas of the booth were made of darkly colored transparent plastic. The interior of the rooms was a bit darker than the show floor so, from the inside, you could easily see people out in the public parts of the booth. From the outside the rooms were too dark to see into unless you used your hands the shield your eyes from the bright lights and peered in, pressing your face close to the wall. There was one gentleman that was staring intently at the TV showing these graphics. The way he was dressed and the way he carried himself and his umbrella left me with the impression that he was British. At the time I wondered, “Who is this guy?”. It was Clive Sinclair.
The discussions about the machine were unstructured and diverse. The machine had been constructed to show off the abilities of the Video Interface Chip (VIC) partly in an attempt to Drive sales of the chip in non-computer applications. Using the chip in a Commodore computer could have that same effect so it was agreed by those present at least that the machine would be called “VIC”. Since my dad wasn’t at these meetings any decisions made were understood to be preliminary.
One of the other people in these meetings was Michael Tomczyk. I think this was the first time I had met him and I knew essentially nothing about him at the time. It was clear from the questions he was asking, and suggestions he made, that the technical aspects of computers were not his area of expertise. Advertising and promotion looked to be where his strengths were to be found. His familiarity with computers seemed to be at the level of a user that was able to program at just past the beginner stage but knew essentially nothing about hardware. When we were introduced he reacted to hearing my last name, and for reasons that are very obvious in hindsight, he sat next me in virtually every meeting for the rest of the visit. He repeatedly asked what VIC stood for and seemed completely lost whenever the conversation got into any of the specifics of the system like signal timings. It was obvious that, like me, this was his first introduction to this machine.
As I headed back to New York it was obvious to me that I had witnessed the birth of something special. Even more than the discussion that led to the PET, this felt like something that could have far wider appeal. It goes without saying that I gave my dad a positive report.
I have no such connection to the C-64. That machine was created without me knowing anything about it. The only contribution I made to that machine is an example program, showing an easy way to create a sprite in BASIC, that I wrote for the Programmer’s Reference Guide.
