History of the PET

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You knew it was coming! Today lesson is for the kids out there that have never seen a P.E.T. During the 80's, it was the only computer is schools here in Canada, but I will get to that later.
The story of the PET, begins, not with Commodore or Jack , but with a amazing man named Chuck. Chuck Peddle.
Chuck some time in the 60's or 70's.
Chuck in 2007 at the Vintage Computer festival Live, via skype from Shrilanka. Yes, he is still working with computers to this day.
The (abridged) story starts when Chuck was at Motorola and saw the first 6800 processor, and said he could do better. Chuck then left Motorola and went to work at MOS Technologies before Commodore had bought them out and created the 6502 Microprocessor. He had created the 6502 as a low cost Mircocontroler and never even thought of making a computer. Chuck would visit customers, and help out to make the 6502 work. Because it was a $20 chip and Motorola wanted over $300 for the 6800, Chuck was busy designing every thing from Pinball machines, to Photocopiers. He even went to help Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs to bring up the Apple (much later)
It was apparent that people wanted a computer on their desks. Chuck had earlier designed the KIM 1, a circuit board, to play with his 6502 chip, but people wanted a box to do accounting, word processing etc. By this time Commodore had bought MOS, so he went to Jack and began to ask to build a Computer. Jack was weary, as nobody was really doing anything in this unproven market.
Then Radio Shack had approached Jack to build a Computer for them. Jack looked as this as an opportunity to sell more Calculators to Radio Shack, so he then gave in. There was even talks to buy Apple at one point, but Steve Jobs wanted way too much money at that point. (Apple had just made the Apple 1 kit).
So Chuck rolled up his sleeves and started to design the PET. They had until a certain date to produce one, to show RS at some show (I think it was Winter CES in Chicago).
Luck was also on their side, as someone at Microsoft built a BASIC for the 6502. At the time, Bill Gates thought the 6502 was a "Crappy" processor and told the guy to sell it for as much as he could, and move on to something that would make Microsoft real Money. Chuck and Jack, met with Bill and negotiated for BASIC. Jack was a very practical man, he didn't know if they would sell any computers, nor would he gamble on "future Sales" he wanted to pay once, and one time only. So, the story goes that Jack was the only one who ever got the best of Bill. Commodore got the rights to include basic in EVERY machine that they sold, and both Microsoft and Commodore could upgrade it at any time, Microsoft got the right to sell it to anyone else.
How much you ask? Well, there has always been a "gentleman's" agreement not to disclose the price, But unconfirmed reports say between $10,000 and $50,000. If Microsoft knew just how many Commodore computers used the same Basic, they probably would have insisted on "per Computer Sold".
During the making of the PET, Chuck had made a nice curved case and put a full keyboard on the prototype. Jack came back and said "Why plastic?" "I have a file Cabinet maker up in Toronto, lets use metal"and "Why a full keyboard?" "Why not use a calculator keyboard, we have tons of those". Chuck did not know it then, but Jack had no money, as the Calculator business was drying up with very cheap units from Japan.
Now, with the Calculator keyboard, Chuck had room to impliment a cassette deck for storing data. You have to remember, at this time, there was no "Home Computers" so they were making it up as they went along, and Chuck was being very practical, Hard Drives, and Floppy Drives were just about NON-existent or cost way too much. A cheap Sanyo Cassette deck, was perfect at the time for datta storage.

Chuck also knew the need for graphics and designed a graphics set so people could create games and play cards etc. It was based on the ASCII subset, but latter, people called it "Petscii"
So, the electronics show came and Commodore presented their new system to Radio Shack. They passed (It was said they did this to a few other companies, and took all the best Ideas and made the TRS-80).
Chuck was not going to give up, he then went back and perfected the computer. Now it needed a name, and Jack wanted something friendly. A guy made over a million dollars that year selling the pet rock, so they decided on PET. Later Chuck would revel (for a joke) the PET stood for "Personal Electronic Transactor", but really it was just a friendly name. And thus the PET was born.
At the first "official" showing of the PET, they had only a handful of units. Jack needed cash and fast to "Bootstrap" production (they were all made by hand). He than declared, that they were going to sell them on a pre-order basis. You paid in full, and in 90 days you would have your PET or your money back. Chuck got his Beautiful Wife at the time to take the orders, while he demo'ed the unit, and there were so many people lined up to give her cash, it was a frenzy. He went upstairs to the "Big Iron" dealers like Univac and nobody was there, they were all downstairs at the Commodore booth. He said he could see this was the "Death knee" for the big main frame computers".

Eventually Commodore filled all the orders (well past the 90 days- but nobody wanted their money back). The biggest complaint was the Chicklet keyboard, you just could not type on it. Jack said "Ok, we tried that. Let's give them a full typewriter keyboard and see what happens".
So chuck moved the Cassette to the outside and gave both a "Home" Keyboard with Petscii symbols, and a "Business" keyboard with out.
Each subsequent model was a minor improvement on the last, the model numbers being the key. For example in the picture shown above, we have a 4016 (most common of all Pets), which simply means, it has a screen that could show 40 characters and it had 16 megs of RAM. Next to it is the 8050 Double disk drive. I will save the story this beast for another day.
Chuck also built them to open very easily like the hood of a car. they even have a "prop rod" in all metal Pets.
The best PET by none is the Super PET. This Pet was commissioned by the University of Waterloo, and not oly does it have a regular PET inside, but a second 6809 board, makeing it probably one for the worlds first DUAL processor computers. It was certainly the most powerful computer at the time.
All was going well with selling the PET, then they went overseas. Jack hit 2 snags almost immediately. One- PET in French means "Fart" or "Shit", and Two, Phillips owned the rights to the name PET. So, in true Commodore style, they Quickly "re-named" (IE-printed up new stickers) it the "CBM" series.
Commodore also made sure that they gave PETS to schools (here in Canada) beginning in about 1978-79. The heavy Metal housing made it perfect for schools, and the only "damage" you see from a school machine is the corners of the black sticker have been tried to peel off, Commodore must have used industrial glue for the sticker, because very few ever came off, and not for lack of trying.The picture above was not uncommon. Infact, other that the model, (we had the typical 4016) you would see classrooms like this up until past 1988 (when I graduated high school). Insuring, that my generation had at least touched a PET in our lifetime.

Over in Europe, things were a bit different:
Some Pets were made of PLASTIC. That and the fact that now Commodore had released a CBM II line. More powerful, disk drives built in, separate monitors and keyboards.
They came in a few different models, the high profile and low profile, it looks like the low prifile had attached keyboards. They even had a few rare Color models. One such model was essentially a C64 in a PET case the P500.
Even though I have never seen or heard of a CBM II here in Canada, that doesn't mean they don't exist. A very small number have popped up on E-bay from time to time from the US, so it is very possible that they were offered for sale here also, but by the time the appeares on store shelves, they were just too far behind the bossiness computers at the time to survive. You also have to factor in the success of the VIC 20 and C64. Jack's mantra was computers for the masses, which meant cheap, and easy to sell. PETS were not that cheap, and Stores did not want product that was harder to sell.

Now, the PET is all but a memory, but you do see them pop up on movies and TV shows from time to time. From Star Trek:
To Terminator 3:
The PET was an ICON back in the 1980 and early 1990's. Now as computers, get faster and better, Intel, Microsoft, and Apple all want to erase it from history.
BTW, I will gladly give any Super PET or CBM II a good home. I plan soon to make a PET sub-domain just like the TED.

My New PET! and I shall Call her GlaDOS!

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Well, it has been a busy week here at the lounge. After a few e-mails, phone calls and such, priorities have changed a bit. Last week, I was all set for a small shopping spree at Amigakit, and then I found out they were sold out of the IDE 97 board for the Amiga 1200. I got busy trying to get all the A4000 stuff together and ship it out, and as it turns out I had to ship it in 2 boxes- there was just that much stuff with all the books and such. After shipping, no profit was actually made over what I paid for it, but thats the breaks. I did increase most of my prices on the on-line store to compensate for the jump in Canada Post shipping Rates.
I was then trying to decide to get a Subway USB port for the 1200 instead (to hook up an external CD-Rom Drive) when I got an e-mail about my Kijiji Ad.
A local guy named Mike had a PET 8032 and a CBM 8050 Double Drive he wanted to give to a good home. He even dropped them off on Monday. He also had a Commodore 1701 monitor.

It had been about 20 years since I last played with a PET, so I opened her up and did a fast clean of the dust. She boots fine, but some of the keys are not working, so I will have to take apart the keyboard (and we all know how much I LOVE to do that). It seems my chore in life is to take apart and clean keyboards. The cable for the disk drive was missing, so I had to track one down. The Toronto Pet User Group has them listed on the "Items for sale" page, but so far I have not heard back from them. I even wonder if anyone is still around to check the e-mail there anymore. It would be fantastic to get this old system up and running fully.
When I opened it up, I found a ROM in the spare ROM slots labelled "WP-4" The guys on the forums suggest that this is a Word Pro 4 ROM, and I need it to run the Word Pro software. Yes, like the C128, the PET had between 2 and 4 extra ROM slots depending on the Model.
This Model (if you are wondering) is the 8032, which simply means it was a later 80 column model with 32 K of RAM, which also means it has a bigger screen than the original 40 column models. With more Ram and more screen room, it was a "Higher up Model". It also has the "Business" Keyboard with NO PETSCI symbols on it. I still want to get a Super Pet though, they had a 6502 processor and a 6809. Better pictures and internals to come later. Oh, how I forgot how I loved the boot sound on these things.

Another One Bites the Dust

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Well, it's another Sunday, and that means another 11 hour shift at work. It's -7, and I have a very weak Internet connection that keeps dropping here (it's taking forever, just to upload 2 photos). It's also Superbowl Sunday, so hopefully all the perverts will be at home today, and I won't have to deal with them. If you haven't been following the Amiga Buzz for a while, last week, on E-bay, a stock A4000 desktop was sold for over $1000. Normally, A stock A4000 run about $400 or so dollars, so there was a lot of buzz over this on the boards. The seller is, has a good reputation, so a lot of rumours are floating around as to what is going on. I just about put my non-working A4000 up just to see if it was a one time fluke or what. I had plans with Craig from Amitrix to repair this beast, when Craig had the time (I suspect the CIA chips have given up the ghost). I also removed the Indivision card and installed the Video toaster card, and put it up as "fill" in my On line store, asking $450, thinking it would never sell.
Well, this week it did, and tomorrow (if I have time before work) or Tuesday (my days off) I have to carefully package it up and ship it out. I admit, I hate to see it go, for I fear, I will never get another one it that shape, but I did say that about my Amiga 1000 and I found a better one.

So, (because I don't have a bank account- I hate banksters) I have a nice nest egg sitting in my paypal account. You would expect the first thing I would do is go on a small shopping spree at AmigaKit, getting an ECS indivision for my Amiga 1000. I noticed they DO have the A1000 indivision adapter for an extra $14. I am not sure if they just got these in or if they had them hidden elsewhere on the site, but in any case I have found them now. In a perfect world, I would get 4 ECS indivisions for now, 1 for the 1000, 1 for each of the 2 600's and 1 for the 500, but that just is not going to happen yet. I would love to double these and get 6 more for ALL my ECS Amigas, (the A500's piled in the store room), but no.
The first thing I did was order 4 more heat sink packages to finish off my C128 from China. Then, I ordered the "New" version of "AmigaForver" direct from Cloanto. I like to support them also. Because it was cheaper to order the pair together, I also got the C64 Forever. I will post more about them, when I receive the package from Cloanto. I did get the "download" of C64, but the Amiga was too big for the flaky Internet connection.
I also want to at least get a 1571 disk drive for my C128, so I am waiting to hear back from an Amibay member, before going nuts at Amigakit.
I also want to get an IDE package from Amigakit, so I can finally hook a CD-rom drive to my A1200. I know once this is done, I can finally get "on line" with the A1200, as the Internet "package" (including network card) that I ordered from AmigaKit, came with a CD, and no floppies. Which, to me, doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since probably only a small percent of A1200 owners actually have a CD rom hooked up to the A1200.

In other news, I lucked out, and came across a few boxed Commodore C2N Dattasettes. The funny thing is, that even though the boxes sort of look the same, they are labelled differently, and one box is actually smaller than the other. If you are familiar with the Dattasette, there seems to be a few different models, probably due to different manufactures. One has the "Stripes" by the Commodore name plate, and one does not. I will investigate this further in the next few weeks.
I also came across a (badly) boxed 1311 joystick, these are the original "white" joysticks that are very similar to the Atari joystick.