Saturday while shopping at a flea market in Tulsa I stumbled across a Vic-20 computer. Vic-20s were released in 1981 by Commodore, and were the company’s predecessor to the popular Commodore 64 computer. Where the C64 had 64k of RAM, the Vic-20 had 4k. For the sake of comparison my laptop, with two gigs, has approximately 500x that amount. I never owned a Vic-20 before in my life. I have no sentimental attachment to them whatsoever and I’m not sure I’ve ever even physically touched one before. So of course I bought it.

When passing by an item such as this, a normal person might say “oh, that’s interesting,” but the packrat thinks, “wow, that’ll look great in my collection!” Now, “collection” is a funny word for most packrats. My garage is knee deep from various piles of junk lying around. Oh wait, I forgot — it’s not junk, it’s THE COLLECTION. A normal person thinks of a collection as a bunch of items on display in some fashion. Not the packrat. For me, a collection is all the stuff I own that’s stored in various places (garage, upstairs, attic, shed). Most of it is not on display. Most of it is not even easily findable at this point.

So, $25 later, I am now the proud (and slightly psychotic) owner of a Commodore Vic-20, along with a dozen games. More than likely the machine will never removed from its box, never be hooked up, and the games will never be played. But hey, at least I now have one for the collection!