As a computer-obsessed preteen the VIC-20 was my first non-single-board computer. I'd initially gotten into computers via electronics and had had a KIM-1 on my "workbench" for a while, but once I got my hands on the Apple IIs in our 5th grade math classroom and discovered that they understood the same machine language as the KIM-1 but were vastly more exciting, I pined for a "real" computer.
I alarmed my teachers by skipping recess to use the computer and read every issue of Creative Computing and Byte I could get my hands on. I even had a floppy that I would bring to the handful of New York City computer stores so that I could surreptitiously get a little extra time in; sometimes they even wouldn't kick me out for a while.
I begged my parents to get me an Apple for at least a year before they relented - partially - and bought me the VIC a few months after it came out. A twentieth of the RAM of a fully-loaded Apple and a 22-column display? No problem, you could still do a lot with that!
Less than a year later, I persuaded them to buy me the newly-released VICmodem. The first night I had it, I was dialing, one after the other, the numbers I found in a magazine article for the various NYC bulletin board systems, mostly running on Apples and TRS-80s, maybe an S-100 box here and there.
I was hooked. I just had to have my own. But what can you do with a 3KB computer? I begged and pleaded again and managed to wangle an 8KB expansion cartridge and, more importantly, a 1540 disk drive. A few days of coding and I had a rudimentary BBS with a message base, private mail, a "chat with sysop" feature, and even text file upload/download/
But, as the linked article mentions, you use the VICmodem by plugging in a modular handset cord. No autoanswer. What to do? Off to Radio Shack to buy an optoisolator with my pocket money - I think I had everything else in my junk box - and shortly I'd put together a janky circuit that would pick up the phone with a signal from, I forget now, maybe the VIC's cassette interface? The "user port" was occupied, of course, by the modem.
And thus was born VTUG-BBS ("VTUG" meaning "VIC Technical User's Group," a mostly-nonexistent organization that, at least, I managed to recruit a few friends into). Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, my parents had granted me my own phone line after the first few times they picked up the receiver only to hear a carrier squeal. So I advertised the number on the local BBSs and soon enough I was getting nonstop back-to-back calls. I'd come back from school, run to my room and check out the call log, maybe break in and chat with whoever happened to be on at the time.
VTUG was, I believe, the first BBS ever to run on a VIC-20, and I got many inquiries about the software, so I started selling it (as RAVICS, "Remote Access VIC System"). $79 a pop, simply because that seemed (from ads in COMPUTE! magazine) to be the going price for "serious" software, and with my naïve kid's idea of what things were worth I offered to bundle the autoanswer interface for an extra $20 - mind you, it probably had almost $20 of Radio Shack components in it once my junk box ran out, taking into account the enclosure. Of course as the orders started coming in I realized that building autoanswer interfaces for zero profit was a bad use of my time and stopped advertising that. (Not to mention that, of course, hooking such a thing up to the phone lines was strictly prohibited by Bell Telephone rules!)
By the time the Commodore 64 came out, I had enough to buy one on the first day, and I had the BBS running on that within a few hours. I remember discovering I had to make a change that would turn off video whenever the 1540 disk drive was accessed; there was some subtle timing problem that Commodore soon corrected with the 1541 model, which I promptly added to my setup. 64K of RAM and two 170K disk drives made for quite a powerful BBS setup by those days' standards and I added lots of nice features, including a hierarchical message system inspired by NYC's multiuser A-Tree BBS of which I was an early denizen.
As for the VICmodem, it worked fine on the C64 and I continued to use it and my homebrew autoanswer for a while, even though I knew my customers were using various autoanswer modems. There was no obvious need to replace it, although I now had enough money to buy whatever modem I wanted. I do recall I played around with a Novation JCat for a while, just because it was kind of cute.
Of course the C64 went on to be wildly popular and as the source of the first, and for a while the only BBS that ran on it, I sold quite a few copies across the country, enough to "live large" through junior high and my first year of high school. But then I discovered math, and more importantly girls, and I figured I didn't have time for that stuff any more. I sold the "business" to some guy out in the Midwest - probably at the best possible time. C64s weren't the future. I used some of the proceeds to buy myself the newly-released IBM XT (10 MEGAbytes of disk? How could I ever use all of that?!), switched to C and Lisp and never looked back...
Wow! You haven't posted in over 5 years. This was worth the wait.
" I had the BBS running on that within a few hours." Is this because the 6502 opcodes are a subset of the 6510 ? Did anyone encourage and assist your curiosity or was it just you and an advanced Commodore technical/reference manual ?
Related I did C64 computer repair in high-school and also lived in NYC. I sold modified peripherals to work with Commodore's Amiga, or game accessories like a parallel port attachment to allow 4 joysticks on games (e.g., Gauntlet). I shipped COD (cash on delivery) and advertised for free on BBS's. It was exciting and I was able to eventually qualify for in-state tuition at ASU partly from the money I had earned over those years ensuring I could afford to graduate.
The 6510 instruction set was identical to that of the 6502, I believe. More importantly, the core I/O routines in the C64's ROM - the so-called "kernal" [sic] - were similar to those in the VIC-20 (I think they even had same entry points) so the "port" was pretty trivial.
The BBS code was originally largely devoted to menu generation, the bulletin and message databases, and of course the routine that drove the modem and console simultaneously (including conversion of Commodore's weird not-really-ASCII so that upper and lower case didn't appear inverted), with provisions for a keystroke to interrupt a menu or message while it was printing (a feature I was very proud of as, believe it or not, many of the prevalent Apple/TRS-80/etc. BBS's of the time didn't do that - remember that at 300 baud printing an entire screen of text could take many seconds!) None of that code had to change from the VIC to the C64.
It also helped that things like file management were largely handled by the 154x disk drive itself (it had its own 6502 and operating system!) so that didn't need to change either. Of course the additional memory allowed me to add a lot of new features to the C64 version going forward.
With respect to your question about encouragement, I have to say that my parents - my father in particular - were initially quite ambivalent about my sudden obsession with computers (which followed on the heels of obsessions with electronics and, earlier, chemistry). My dad had, it transpired later, read some sensationalized newspaper article about the hackers at MIT and how they spent all their time programming, ignoring their studies and so forth, and I guess he didn't want that to happen to me.
That said, he always, always came through in the end. He'd bought me the massive chemistry set I'd begged for when I was a little kid; he would take me down to Canal Street to browse the surplus store for electronic parts; he'd bought me my first oscilloscope out of my "savings account" that I'd probably depleted ten times over; and ultimately, as I said, he did buy me that VIC-20 and peripherals. (He also had a hard-and-fast rule: any book, on any subject, that I wanted he'd buy for me.)
And later, when I was in high school and getting deeply into Lisp (and math) and expressing interest in (what was then called) AI, he cold-called Marvin frickin' Minsky whom he'd read about in the papers ("I've got this kid..." - my dad was just... like... that), and next thing we knew we flew to Boston where we spent an incredible morning at Minsky's house talking about connectionist vs. symbolic approaches, followed by an unforgettable tour by one of his grad students of the AI lab. Yeah, the exact same den of iniquity my dad had originally worried I'd end up in :-)
So, yeah. I guess you could say he encouraged me, in his own way, even if he worried about me a lot. (It's also true that, whatever I was doing on my own, I always did well in school, so that probably assuaged some of his early fears.)
I don't think my parents quite realized what I was up to, once I got involved in the BBS world. My initial excuse for asking for the VICmodem was actually that I'd be able to call up my school's PDP-11/45 (which I certainly did end up doing a lot) but of course BBS's were very alluring and I spent many a late night clicking away while the family slept. I ran into quite a few shady characters "online" - fortunately as a street-smart NYC kid I think I navigated this pretty well, but in retrospect (especially as a parent myself now) I'm kind of shocked at how much independence I had at 12 or 13, facilitated of course by the significant money I was making from the BBS business. My parents just looked on, bemused, and didn't get involved at all other than to go with me to the bank to help me open a checking account.
Anyway, it was a good childhood.
Nice story, thanks. If you’re in the southwest, the CLASS super show is in the spring.
How do you remember this with such clarity?! Amazing.