Remembering the Commodore PET 2001

I wanted one sooooo bad....

I thought it was the coolest looking damn thing ever. It was the only thing that was self-contained in a case. Everything else had a tape deck over here, a monitor over there, a keyboard somewhere else, and maybe the motherboard laying bare on the table.

Instead I got stuck with a TRS-80 Model I with 4K of RAM. I remember the upgrade to 16K was $220, and my mother said I didn't need it because her IBM 360 mainframe only had 16K. (yup, my mum taught me to flowchart)

But hey, that was still more computer than my high school had.

Sniff!

I sold these in Tottenham Court Road in 1978

together with the early Apple ][ (pre Apple Disk Drive Apple used a standard audio external cassette recorder) and other assorted boxes.....those were the days.

To those who want to travel down memory lane.....

CBM - PET

Apple ][

Dragon32

BBC Micro

Compucolor

Vic-20

Acorn

Sinclair ZX-80/ZX-81 and then the one theat broke it all open the Spectrum

I remember them all well........

Byte shop anyone?

This really does take me back. I worked in the Byte Shop in Gants Hill the day after it opened in 1977 (I think). We sold the Pet 2001, The Cromemco Z2D, the North Star Horizon,the Kim 1, the Sim 1 and the Nascom. If I remember rightly, the Pet sold for £795 originally, though I think that was the 8k model. Eeeh, those were the days...

@Anonymouse coward who sold Pets in TCR - can you remember (are you willing to name) the computer shop you worked in?

Loved it

Had one (8K) and loved it. I learnt how to program from the manual, although assembler eluded me until the Speccy came along.

The motherboard had 5 6502s, I think, and at least one of them could be taken out with no visible effect on the machine's performance (I think it probably controled the edge-connector I/O which as a kid I didn't use much).

I've still got

two of the 8000 series (a square edged one and the later round edged model) along with a dual disk drive. I should probably try to flog them - they're not doing much good stuck in the attic!

DRAGON 32!!!!

man I loved that thing. 'Juxtaposition' was the most amazing game for quite some time.

Learnt to type on one of those

We had one in my secondary school which was so well used the decals had come off all the keys, so unless you fancied stabbing away for hours producing gibberish, you had to learn the QWERTY layout PDQ.

Sharp learnt a lot from these with their MZ-80A's

</reminisce>

I'd forgotten the MZ-80a!

That was a pretty cool machine if I remember rightly. At the Byte Shop we also got the first Compucolor in the country. I remember getting very excited about it because it was the first colour CP/M machine. It arrived at something like 8 at night. It had an American plug so we cut that off, stripped the wires, put it in a safety block, turned it on... And BANG!!! Yes - in our excitement we hadn't thought - American plug - American voltage/wattage? It had blown the main transformer. Our boss was not best pleased.

I also once had a guy in the shop threaten me with two nasty dogs when I refused to accept back Trash-80 memory from us because he'd bent the legs inserting them. SIMMs are for poofs...

Oh - and I've chosen the Hilton icon, not because there's any Hilton angle here, more that it's the only one that shows someone shedding a tear and with all the nostalgia here, that's what I'm doing... <sniff sniff>

Egg advert

I bet anyone whose remotely geeky has seen the Egg adverts with the hamsters and will have noticed the Pet in one of them. The other advert has the Tandy TRS-80. My wife definately thought I was a geek when I noticed the computers and could identify them! ;-)

I remember using the Pet when I was in 6th form. I also worked on a product for pharmcists that would run on the Tandy TRS-80. Ahh, great times then. :-)

Can't wait for the Sharp MZ-80K to be featured. I've still got mine in the attic!

More about memory

But first: @IanKRolfe - It may well have been me. I wasn't the manager (I was too young) but I was trainee manager. I used to bunk off from school - Ilford County High (bloody hell, this is beginning to sound like Friends Reunited!) to work there. The manager was Vince Cohen.

I blagged my way into the shop and was hired as halfway between a shop assistant and a bouncer. Frequently I would still have my blazer on...

I really feel that, as these sad revelations are springing forth I should leave.

Yes, mine's that white one over there with sown-up sleeves that do up round the back. Thanks.

aah . the memories

having to program in a real mens computer language : assembly.

last week i had a nasty surprise : void main void { while (1) x=x +1; } on a risc machine .. 3.6 kilobytes of ROM code !. with all optimizers switched on : 92 bytes of code... in machine language : 2 instructions : INCR ACC , CLR PC

talk about bloatware these days ... c compilers ... i want my PL/M compiler back

@Madge

That's such a familar list :)

Sure there wasn't an RML 380Z in there as well?

Got one!

This was my first "computer". I bought one with my then life savings of £400-00 (a hell of a lot of money in the late 1970's). I was only 14 at the time. I think it came from a shop in Liverpool called DAMS Office Supplies???

The tiny keyboard was a pain to use, but you got used to it.

I was doing Electronics at "O" level at the time and I upgraded the RAM myself from 4K to 8K. I had to de-solder the old chips and replace. Somewhat heart stopping, but it worked.

I also built a Joystick using an Atari one as a basis. Worked a treat!

Final project was to to connect it to a second hand 110baud teletype to act as a printer - I built my own 20mA current loop interface and wrote the machine code to drive it.

Ah, happy days!

Stood me in good stead, 30 years later I'm still working in IT.

By the way, I've never been able to part with it, it's in my attic gathering dust.

For those of you pining for a simple life...

If you'd like to hack round with close-to-the-metal computing again, take a look at the Parallax STAMP. Its a tiny motherboard that fits a 24 pin DIP socket. You program it in integer BASIC and it has 16 i/o pins which can all be used for digital i/o or as ADCII lines. It will do about anything you can imagine provided you can fit it into 2K of EEPROM and 32 bytes of RAM.

See www.parallax.com or http://www.milinst.com/index.htm in the UK if you'd like to play.

Continuing the original theme, my first computer was a self-assembled SS-50 system from Brian Hewart. It had a 2 MHz 6809 for power and ran Flex-09 off twin floppies. I soldered it together and then debugged the hardware with a logic probe and multimeter. It was programmed in assembler, BASIC, C or (the best) PL/9, which is based on PL/M. It still runs, though its now in a different chassis with 4 floppies, an 80 x 25 screen (originally 64 x 16) and a whole 48 K RAM. The change in screen format required a complete ROM rewrite, but that was no problem as I had an EPROM burner in it as well.

From there I moved to OS-9 on a 68020 and then Linux. Needless to say DOS, 'doze and Borland C was there in the background for work compatibility.

I hope El Reg keeps this series going, but as well as classic hardware, it would be nice to cover the pre-1981 operating systems: CP/M, Concurrent CP/M, DR-DOS, the UCSD p-system, Flex 2 & 9 and OS-9 to mention the main ones.

Music to my ears

After learning to program on a KIM-1, this was paradise. No more hex operands...

I spent a few good years programming these - they got quite good with the 2048 etc.

The highlight for me was getting software to run on the embedded 6502 controller in the external SCSI hard disk drive and banging the heads with varied delays to make music. Needless to say it wasn't my system...

Ah, fond memories indeed...

In fact, it was my very first computer to play with and I actually still have it (in working order)! Mind you - it's the later 8KB model with the full size keyboard and external tape drive.

Exidy ruled!

We Exidy Sorcerer owners were secure in the superiority of our "real" keyboard and 30x64 character display...

Thanks for the Memories!

I bought a PET in 1979. Cost me about $1000 (US). 14K ROM and 8K memory (the OS used the first 1K).

I did my first serious programming on that machine: a DBM (in BASIC!) for a study I was doing where I worked. I remember a LOT of reads & writes to/from the cassette for that one.

The Assembler for that was a lot of fun, too.

Memories. Sometimes wish I still had that box.

@Danny

Maybe age has dimmed your memory somewhat. The Amiga was a wonderful machine, but robust? It had no memory protection, a single null pointer deref could take it down in a steaming heap of guru meditation. Yes, it had proper pre-emptive multitasking (unlike MacOS/various MS efforts) but could still be taken down instantly by the most trivial bug in a program.

good memories

The PET was the first computer I ever used, and it was regarded as a powerful and mysterious thing in school! Only 6th formers had access to it, and the A key was kinda worn out (primarily because it was the fire key for the Space Invaders game!) I recall it had twin external floppy disk drives (5.25") and you had to type >$0 for a directory listing.

I used to buy PCW magazine which had program listings, and I'd spend hours typing them in, only to find they wouldn't work... assuming I'd made a typo, I'd spend hours going through the listing again and again, and eventually give up, and then the following month the magazine would publish a correction to the listing....!

Pokes and peeks... ahh happy days.

Lovely.

Although the Acorn Electron was the first machine I learnt to program (or programme as it was known in those days), I still have respect for the PET - a design classic. Storage, keyboard, CPU and screen all in one neat unit? Funny how things come around!

Ooh, I do hope this series touches on the BBC B micro - not the earliest or the most powerful of its time, but the first computer of the people most certainly, and the BBC Basic language truly a beauty to behold (the astonishingly well written manual is still on my bookcase, and I still occasionally flick through it with glee, much to the disgust of others)

No wimpy programming allowed here !!!

Cut my teeth on an early PET 2001; Graduated to a C64 with a floppy drive!!!

Toughest assignment: design a game that the player CANNOT LOSE without it being overly obvious. Done for an electronic shop intent on giving away "freebie" merchandise for promotional purposes.

Went with a "find the buried treasure" approach.

Didn't want to board the ship? You were plied into service in the best of Her Majesty's traditions by the "gang".............

Didn't want to navigate towards the Island? A hurricane "miraculously" appeared to whisk you on the way...

Couldn't walk to the treasure? A local earthquake can help you with that....

Etc etc.

Jolly good fun (if you pardon the pun) and all done on a base model C64, full graphics, joystick and on a large tv for all to see.

Now I'm in management with my memories... sigh.......

That takes me back

That takes me back, not to the early 80's but the early 90's. We had one of these machines at secondary school in the CDT department. The teacher explained a bit about it and we got to see the insides too (I always thought the car bonnet type opening was added by my teacher!). Being a true geek I was fascinated by the machine.

I'm really looking forward to the next article. My first computer was a ZX81 when I was about 5 and it was fairly old then.

I'm now trying to make a collection of retro machines, so far I've managed to pick up a Vic20, Acorn Electron, Spectrum + and only yesterday I picked up a Dragon 32 which I'm looking forward to playing with.

As much as I love emulation, it just isn't the same as actually using the original machines. :-)

Rob

memories

I remember passing my O' Level Computer Science on the back of programming projects completed on one of these Commodore PET's. I was one of the second intake inour school to study computing of any description, and one of the first three students offered the O' Level qualification when our tutor was supposed ot take his. Bless the guy, whilst we three all passed ours, juggling his job and family had an impact on our dear old tutor, as he failed his on the first time of asking, whilst managing ot get enough knowledge into us to pass. These days he wouldn't have been permitted to attempt such a stunt unless he had passed the exam first....

PET - the last good computer Commodore ever made*

* I'm lying, Commodore have never made a decent 'puter.

Title

Awww, now you've made me go all misty-eyed. Those truly were the days. ZX81. Acorn Electron. Vic20. PET. Apple ][. BBC Micro. The excitement of colour, and sound, for the first time. *sigh*.