Hey hey! It’s VIC-20 Tuesday again.

The Commodore VIC-20 came with a manual called:

Personal Computing on the VIC-20: A friendly computer guide

The Internet archive contains a scan of the 1982 5th edition (second printing) of this manual:

https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20_1982_Commodore/page/n1/mode/2up

And it also has a copy that is probably the first printing. It has a 1981 date and does not mention an edition number:

https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_on_the_VIC-20_1981_Commodore/page/n1/mode/2up

This should mean there were at least five versions of this manual. Does anyone have sources for other editions?

Also, the 1981 version was credited to Commodore International, Ltd. but the 1982 5th edition says Commodore Electronics, Ltd. What’s the story on the name change? Or was one the Commodore business from a different area of the world?

The reason behind this quest is to try to see how many versions of the type-in VIC-20 games were printed in these manuals. R.M. Smedley noticed that there were some minor differences in the Tank-V-UFO game listed in the 1981 version versus the 1982 version — specifically around lines 134-135.

I would like to find the other editions of this manual and try to type in all the program listings as accurately as possible so they can be compared.

Help?

More to come…