[Coco] VIC-NIC NEWS

[Allen Huffman]

As some here know (from hearing me tell the tale), my first computer was a Commodore VIC-20, which I had about a year before getting my first TRS-80 Color Computer (right when Extended Color BASIC came out).

I wrote a ton of games and stuff for my VIC and one day I need to see if the tapes can be read by an emulator so I can see what I programmed like when I was 12.

Anyway, I had a program published in a newsletter thing called VIC-NIC NEWS. I don't remember anything about it, or even how I found out about them, but it was a "KaBoom" type game where you moved a thing back and forth to catch dropping objects. Very simple, text based. Ironically, because of this simple game being published, a company in Houston (that had some kind of VIC-20 magazine on cassette) ended up NOT publishing my REAL version of the game (with graphics) because it was too similar to the one in VIC-NIC. (They went out of business, before they could publish anything of mine.)

So I was searching, on a whim, for VIC-NIC NEWS tonight and found two references -- both scans of some Commodore magazine that reprinted a program from VIC-NIC in 1983.  I could find nothing else, so on another whim, I started searching for CHUG -- Commodore Houston Users Group -- to see if I could track anyone down who was plugged in back then.

Nothing... But I found a reference in Google Groups... Someone mentioned CHUG!

And ... it was me. On this list. In 1983. Telling a story of piracy.

Grrrr.

So in case some kind of Google 'bot indexes this message, maybe someone will find this post some day that knows something about VIC-NIC NEWS. I'd love to see my old program listing. I don't believe I ever had anything other than a few letters and some ads published in Rainbow.

		-- Allen