In Fall of 1984, a friend bought one of these for his Commodore 64. He talked me into buying one for my C64. We chatted clumsily with the spartan terminal software for a while. I had an ad for a local BBS in a magazine. We called that BBS which had a list of numbers for other BBS's in town. We started calling those.

During those days of calling a lot of BBS's on a regular basis, I was calling on a rotary-dial phone. That got to be hard on the finger if you encountered a busy signal. It wasn't too long before my friend and I each picked up a Westridge sutomodem ... which was a workalike for the Commodore 1650 automodem ( both the Westridge and the 1650 had auto-answer and auto-dial (pulse) capabilities.

If I remember correctly, on a C64, you could push the vicmodem to 400 and 450 baud for boards that supported it, but the communications errors were higher. It garbled characters frequently ... usually attributed to line-noise.

In the latter 80's, I had gotten rid of my old computer gear and was getting ready to buy something new. In the interim, I picked up a VIC-20 with a vicmodem for about $25. That allowed me to visit the local BBS's until I got some better hardware.