Discussion on:

Chicklet style keyboard (Inside the Commodore Pet 2001 vintage computer)

When I first started using PC's, the Commodore PET 2000 series was what I used. We had three of them in our computers class at high school. It was a part of the process leading me into a 27 year IT career... Such memories!

My first taste of computing. Spreadsheets on Visicalc and writing inventory programs in Basic. Did most of the programming at home on my C64.

A very forward thinking Algebra teacher had two of these bad boys. When he offered a basic programming class I jumped at the chance. My first program was horse racing. The user would start out with $100 and place a bet on one of five horses. Poking a set of five Pi symbols randomly across the screen was a challenge but once one crossed the ?finish line? the contest ended and the payout was given and/or taken away.

I have been lucky. A few years later I was taking a CPU theory class. The instructor was one of the few who programmed ENIAC. To say the least, he was brilliant. He could convert 4 digit hex to decimal in his head.

.. computing to school kids using these things in 1982.

Geat machines, if a little temperamental.

Les.

The first computer I ever used circa 1980
I had a tape full of wonderful games, but for some strange reason the one you wanted to play was always at the other end of the tape!

My family had numerous Commodore computers, but when I started a computer consulting business, I thought the SuperPET was a superbly fantastic computer - it had both the 6502 and z80 processors, had the full range of micro programming languages from Waterloo (Pascal, APL, Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, as well as Commodore Basic 4.0. A half ton of documentation too. What a machine - IEE-488 connectors to daisy-chain peripherals, solid, Industrial -type construction. Built to last.

So, what can you do with it?

Thanks for the memory. The Commodore PET was the first PC I had seen in 1978. As a young test engineer at Learjet, one of our senior instrumentation engineers brought one into work to demonstrate.

I still have mine

It's unbelievable to be able to find so much about an old computer I cut my teeth on. I took some programming courses and used the PET to do homework. I ended up moving to Iceland for 5-1/2 years and the PET was my PC for a couple of those. I had upgraded from the 'chicklet' keyboard PET to the full keyboard PET and also added more RAM and 3 EPROMMs that allowed me to save and load programs 4x faster than the regular tape deck, it was call RABBIT, there was a compiler/decompiler (forget the name of it) and a chip called TOOLKIT. This certainly brings back memories. When I showed people a picture of my old PET at work, they couldn't believe it. Most of them are at least 20 years younger than me and haven't seen anything like it. They usually remember something like the C64 as their earliest machine. BTW, I still have my full keyboard PET and it runs fine.

Solitaire with ANSI character cards!

I remember that there was supposed to be a routine that would destroy the PET. I don't know anyone whose PET was ruined this way. Of course my friends and I cut our teeth on the KIM-1.

I had one in 1982! So there!
Max

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