Commodore VIC‑1001
The Commodore VIC-1001 is the first general purpose computer developed by Commodore International. It was originally introduced in 1980 as the successor to the Commodore PET-2001 and has only been released in Japan.
Commodore VIC‑1001
The Commodore VIC-1001 is the first general purpose computer developed by Commodore International. It was originally introduced in 1980 as the successor to the Commodore PET-2001 and has only been released in Japan.
The VIC-1001 was developed as a lower cost alternative to the popular PET range. It was intended to appeal to a wide audience, including families and novice computer users, whereas PET was mainly for the more serious and business user. The computer was based on the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor and was released with a base configuration of 5 kilobytes (KB) of RAM.
The VIC-1001 offered a number of features that were impressive for its time. It is the first Commodore computer to have color, thanks to the VIC-1 chip. It featured color graphics with a resolution of 176x184 pixels and a sound chip capable of generating square wave, sawtooth wave and white noise. The VIC-1001 also had Japanese characters on the keyboard, the so-called Katana.
A few months after the release of the VIC-1001, the VIC-20 was released. Except for the keyboard and the character ROM, these machines are the same.
