--- title: Commodore 1600 VICmodem | daily.dev description: The Commodore 1600 VICmodem, released in March 1982, was the first modem to sell for under $100. Built around a Motorola MC14412 chip with only six other... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/commodore-1600-vicmodem-lviiqgk0b twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Commodore 1600 VICmodem | daily.dev og:description: The Commodore 1600 VICmodem, released in March 1982, was the first modem to sell for under $100. Built around a Motorola MC14412 chip with only six other... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/commodore-1600-vicmodem-lviiqgk0b og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/LvIiQgK0b.png og:image:alt: Commodore 1600 VICmodem og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Commodore 1600 VICmodem **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary The Commodore 1600 VICmodem, released in March 1982, was the first modem to sell for under $100. Built around a Motorola MC14412 chip with only six other components, it lacked autodial and required users to dial manually, then plug the phone cord into the modem after hearing the carrier tone. The author estimates around 140,000 units were sold. In Canada, modular phone handsets were illegal at the time, so Commodore bundled a rotary phone with a hardwired handset that couldn't work with the modem, and an adapter called the VIC-1605 was created. Commodore liquidated remaining stock through C.O.M.B. in 1986 for $19 each; the author says a loose unit is worth less than $10 and the most he has seen a boxed example sell for is $36. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### Why did the Commodore 1600 VICmodem require manually dialing the phone instead of autodialing? Commodore cut costs by eliminating the speaker and microphone needed for an acoustic coupler and any autodial circuitry. Users had to pick up the phone, dial manually, listen for the modem carrier tone, then unplug the handset and plug the phone cord into the back of the 1600. This kept the parts count low, using a Motorola MC14412 plus only six other chips, to hit a sub-$100 price point. _Collectors piecing together old hardware quirks like this often compare notes on daily.dev._ ### Why was the Commodore VICmodem illegal to use as intended in Canada? Modular phone handsets were illegal in Canada at the time, but the VICmodem required a modular handset jack to plug into the phone. Commodore's Canadian bundle included a rotary phone with a hardwired handset that couldn't connect to the modem at all, so Commodore created the VIC-1605 adapter, with an RJ-9 jack for the modem and two RJ-11 jacks, to let a phone and the modem coexist legally. _Readers digging into regional tech regulation history can track these oddities on daily.dev._ ### How many Commodore 1600 VICmodems were sold and what are they worth now? Roughly 140,000 units were sold, despite a claim from an ex-Commodore executive that it was the first modem to reach a million units sold. Today a loose VICmodem sells for less than $10, while the most a boxed, complete example has sold for is $36; serial number visibility and box condition affect resale value. _Vintage hardware buyers pricing a find can cross-check figures like these on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 32 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-10-30). **TL;DR:** Nostalgic reminiscing dominates, with many recalling their first BBS experiences via the VICmodem, alongside some technical nitpicking about missing details like baud rate in the article. **Sentiment:** 80% positive · 15% mixed · 5% skeptical **The case for** - Many fondly recall the VICmodem as their gateway into BBSing and computing culture. - Several shared detailed personal stories of building on top of it, like homemade autoanswer circuits and early BBS software. **The pushback** - Some felt the article was incomplete for omitting the baud rate (300 baud), a key spec for anyone familiar with modems. - A few noted the awkward manual dial/plug workflow needed more technical explanation. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Dominated by nostalgic personal anecdotes about first BBS experiences, with minor griping about missing technical details like baud rate. **Open questions** - Why didn't the VICmodem support tone dialing given the hardware constraints of the time? **Highlights** > 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, incl > — [kiscica on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304932) > My first modem, also around that time was... 10 Dutch guilders (around $4.50 at that time). That's 'cause I bought a suspiciously modem-looking (markings, phone line transformer, line relay, etc.) full-size rack-mount board at a swap meet, no documentation on the thing, bunch of switches and leds on the front, S100-like connector on the back, 'sold for parts'. I traced the circuitry, managed to work out its intricacies, figured out what voltage it needed to work, powered it up and started experimenting. After a few days I had it worked out, created an interface to my C-64 to run the thing through the user port - with pulse auto-dial! - and built ye olde wooden enclosure with built-in power supply and a single-slot rack mount for the thing. It worked for years and was my first way to get online with that machine. It was the classiest modem I ever had, bar none. I wonder what that board was originally used for, it was quite an elaborate thing, a half-size board sandwiched on top of a full-sized one, a bunch of expensive-looking white ceramic gold-capped circuits on the top board, the bottom one full of discrete components. It must have been something serious and expensive. Still, I suspect the C-64 I ended up connecting it to may have had more computing power than the original host. > — [hagbard\_c on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50303914) > Pulse dialing is not sound (although you certainly can hear it), it's the phone circuit closing and opening. This modem plugs into a modular handset connector for a phone, that's after the hook switch and the duplex, so it's got two lines for microphone and two for speaker, and it can't hang up the line, so it can't pulse dial. It could potentially do tone dialing, but that does need more hardware. A modern telephone modem is basically 8-bit 8000Hz PCM and DSP algorithms, but an 300 baud modem uses 4 fixed frequencies (from wikipedia): > The originating station used a mark tone of 1,270 Hz and a space tone of 1,070 Hz. > The answering station used a mark tone of 2,225 Hz and a space tone of 2,025 Hz. DTMF dialing needs 7 different frequencies and you have to generate two frequencies at once. You might also want to detect dialtone which fully standardized in the 80s and anyway is a different set of frequencies. Even if you had tone dialing, a lot of people had lines without tone dialing in the 80s, so it's going to be a fringe feature ... and if you already have to manually pick up the phone, because the modem lacks a hook switch and a duplex, might as well also dial the phone manually too. > — [toast0 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50307728) > A friend found one discarded in a phone booth, and gave it to me, the only VIC-20 owner he knew. It changed my life. It gave me places to go when I really needed them. It gave me an escape. I am forever grateful. Shoutout to the rest of the PhoneLine Phantoms, Army BBS, Datanet, and especially Paladin's Palace, for which I can still dial the number on a rotary phone in the dark. > — [Singletail on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50304044) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50244486) · 43 points · 32 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [1983 Northern Telecom Commodore Phone](https://daily.dev/posts/1983-northern-telecom-commodore-phone-pcgskezzr) · Two Stop Bits · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Building A Discrete Component 75 Baud Modem](https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-discrete-component-75-baud-modem-4fsmbyvxt) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [First Commodore PET sold, June 5, 1977](https://daily.dev/posts/first-commodore-pet-sold-june-5-1977-mocd7ahzo) · Two Stop Bits · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Commodore's comeback now includes a flip phone that blocks social media](https://daily.dev/posts/commodore-s-comeback-now-includes-a-flip-phone-that-blocks-social-media-4kuqhyf1n) · XDA Developers · 1 upvotes · 0 comments --- [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/commodore-1600-vicmodem-lviiqgk0b) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Commodore 1600 VICmodem","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/commodore-1600-vicmodem-lviiqgk0b","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/commodore-1600-vicmodem-lviiqgk0b"},"datePublished":"2026-10-30T18:04:43.412Z","dateModified":"2026-10-30T18:05:19.139Z","description":"The Commodore 1600 VICmodem, released in March 1982, was the first modem to sell for under $100. 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