Commodore's 1600 VICmodem Was the First Modem Under $100, and You Dialed by Hand, Then Plugged In the Handset Cord

Here’s how a call went, in Dave Farquhar’s words: “after you picked up the phone, dialed it, and heard a modem carrier, you unplugged the handset and plugged the cord into the back of the 1600.” A slide switch on the modem told it whether you were making the call or answering one. The handset cord went into an RJ-9 jack.

That design is how Commodore hit the price. Michael Tomczyk, who pushed the project inside Commodore, wanted to “price it at retail for $99,” according to oldcomputr.com. He also negotiated “$200 worth of telecomputing services (CompuServe, the Source and Dow Jones)” to come with it. The modem itself “couldn’t directly dial the number.” Commodore outsourced the design to Anchor Automation.

The handset trick had a problem north of the border. In Canada, Farquhar writes, Commodore bundled a Northern Telecom phone, “a rotary phone with a hardwired handset, so you couldn’t use it with the 1600,” because “modular handsets were illegal in Canada at the time.” The fix was another box, the VIC-1605, with “an RJ-9 jack for the VICmodem and two RJ-11 jacks.”

How many sold is still argued. Tomczyk “claims it was the first modem to sell a million units.” Farquhar thinks otherwise: “I think they sold closer to 140,000 of them,” and he’s “never seen one with higher than a six-digit serial number.” Commodore cleared its leftover stock in 1986, and C.O.M.B. Liquidators sold them for $19.

That gap is the opening for anyone who wants one. A working VICmodem costs less than lunch, and the hard part today isn’t the price. It’s finding a phone with a modular handset and a line that still carries a modem tone.