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...

Commodore 1600 VICmodem