Adverts featuring the Commodore VIC-20

The first ever computer to sell over one million units, Commodore's VIC-20 - for Video Interface Chip, plus a number picked at random which sounded "friendly" - was essentially a colour PET, the world's first true personal computer in the modern sense.

With only 3.5K of available memory, thanks to its re-purposing of a glut of small memory chips Commodore had floating around, and an unusual 23-column display, the VIC did have the advantage of being very well built, and came with a particularly good keyboard.

And with its 1MHz MOS Technology 6502 processor and a minimal, if almost hostile, BASIC, it was also suprisingly fast, often coming in near the top of the 8-bit league tables in performance.

It was even faster than machines like the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, even though the Speccy shipped with a 3.5MHz Z80.