On February 20, 2010 a VIC-20 tweeted

Fifteen years ago, Twitter was still relevant. And nobody had ever tweeted from a Commodore VIC-20, the best selling computer of 1982, before. Syd Bolton, the curator of the Canadian Personal Computer Museum, decided to fix that. And on February 20, 2010, a VIC-20 tweeted.

Tweeting from a Commodore VIC-20

Bolton wrote a program called TweeVER, which stands for Tweeting from a Vintage Computer. Stored on a cassette, TweeVER connected a VIC-20 to the Internet and allowed it to tweet, and it fit in a stock, unexpanded VIC-20 with 3.5 kilobytes of usable memory. That’s kilobytes. Not megabytes and not gigabytes.

“For me, it was an engineering experiment. Taking a computer that was almost 30 years old and integrating it into modern society was all the drive I needed,” Bolton said at the time.

The VIC-20 was an underpowered machine even when it was first released in 1981. It was the first computer with color to sell for less than $300, but it took some compromises to get to that price point. It could only display 22 columns of text, had a 1 MHz processor, and was intended to connect to a portable television for a display. Commodore made a disk drive for it but it cost $500, considerably more than the computer itself. So most purchasers opted for a $70 cassette drive that used audio cassette tapes to store programs and data instead.

Why tweeting from a VIC-20 was fitting

In 1982, Commodore did release an inexpensive modem for the VIC-20, the first modem to retail for less than $100. A VIC-20 plus a VICmodem cost less than some competing modems all alone. In its Christmas 1982 catalog, Montgomery Ward sold the VIC-20 for $229 and the modem for $99. The combination was the least expensive way to get online in 1982, so it provided tens of thousands of consumers in the early 1980s with their first introduction to telecommunications.

The stereotype of a hacker/phone phreaker/software pirate with a cheap Commodore and modem became cliche by the late 1980s, but it all started with the VIC-20 and the VICmodem in 1982.

Because of the VIC-20’s unique place in history, tweeting from one at least once seems oddly appropriate, in addition to the immense technical challenge.

Making the tweet happen

On Saturday, February 20, 2010 at approximately 11:06 AM, journalist Richard Beales sat down at a VIC-20 at the Canadian Personal Computer Museum and sent a tweet, making the VIC-20 the oldest computer to ever tweet.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find a copy of the tweet. The Canadian Personal Computer Museum’s feed only goes back to 2011. And even though coverage of the event from the time exists, none of them contained a screenshot of the tweet, unfortunately.

Of course today, we’d probably connect the VIC-20 up to Bluesky instead. I’d argue the VIC-20 is more relevant in 2026 than Twitter is now, and the golden age of microblogging a couple hundred characters at a time is probably over. On November 23, 2025, Twitter added a feature showing where accounts originate from, and revealed that about 70% of political influencers on Twitter were not based in the country they claimed to be. The feature vanished after two hours once the data proved inconvenient to the current owner of Twitter.

Dave Farquhar

David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.