The Gadget We Miss: the Commodore PET
This primitive computer was many people’s first experience of home computing
The first time is the one you remember: first crush, first kiss and first BASIC program. These are the ones that stick in your mind long after those involved are no longer around, and the Commodore PET was the first computer that many people actually touched. Before the PET, computers were big, impersonal things that people worshipped from afar. After the PET, the computer became personal.
Announced in 1977, the Commodore PET was cheap (at $595) and included everything in one unit: motherboard, storage on a tape drive, keyboard and display. It included 4K of RAM (or 8K if you splashed out for the upgraded $795 model) and 14K of ROM with a built-in BASIC interpreter (ironically, written by Bill Gates and Paul Allen of a small company called Micro-Soft). This meant that you could turn it on and start writing BASIC programs immediately: a big plus for the educational markets that the PET became dominant in later.
By comparison, the Apple II that was announced the same year was a bare motherboard that you had to build yourself and add bits onto before you could use it. And it was more expensive.
PET stood for Portable Electronic Transactor, although this was only spelt out on a few models, and this label was replaced by Computer on later ones. The PET was designed by Chuck Peddle, who had been the designer of the 6502 processor at MOS technologies. Commodore Business Machines had been looking for a new market after Texas Instruments had beaten them in the calculator market, and the cheap 6502 processor caught the eye of Jack Traimel, the controversial head of Commodore. He was a holocaust survivor who insisted that the dealers who bought his equipment paid up-front, in cash. Inspired by Peddles vision of a low-cost computer, Traimel bought out MOS Technologies and set Peddle to work. The result was the PET, which, with a rolled steel case and square plastic keys, bore more than a passing resemblance to the office filing cabinets that Commodore Business Machines also made.
In a review in the March 1978 issue of Byte (Available as a PDF from Archive.org), Dan Fylstra declared that the PET was an excellent device for most users.
For the casual user, the PET is a very low cost computer which can be programmed easily in BASIC, for use in schools, for playing games and for fairly complex calculations in engineering, statistics and the like. A better keyboard, a disk and a reliable printer would make it su itab le for some business applications. — Dan Fylstra, Byte Vol 3 issue 3
Popular Science put the PET on their cover, headlining it as “Low cost models can change your life-style”. Inside, they declared that “you can become an expert in a couple of hours”.
The PET was an immediate hit, despite Commodore only being able to make 32 units a day. In particular, the ability to boot straight into a BASIC programming environment meant that it was well suited to education, as there was no long and complex loading procedure. Many were bought for the then-new computer labs that progressive schools and colleges offered. In response to this demand, Commodore created the 4000 series, which had a larger screen and no tape drive. It did offer a LAN (Local Area Network) connection that the machine could connect to when it booted, so programs and files could be copied from one computer to another.
The PET was a distinctive computer, with a 9-inch green screen monitor and an oddly designed keyboard with square keys. It did use a standard QWERTY layout, but the letters on the keys shared space with a large number of graphical block characters that were used to create simple graphics. These gave many of the programs that the PET ran a unique look.
The PET remained a feature of computer labs and college campuses for many years, but Commodore didn’t recapture the revolutionary feel of the PET in later models. There were updates over the next few years that added floppy disc drives and even early hard drives with a capacity of 7.5 Megabytes. However, technology moved on and smaller, more compact computers started moving into the PETs market, and the last PET was the SuperPET, an educational model that had a second processor. However, by this point Commodore had lost much of the educational market to Apple, who had been aggressively selling the Apple II into schools. The last gasp was a reworked PET called the CBM-II series, which failed to make much of an impact.
But Commodore was far from done, because in the early 1980s, another one of their models was starting to make headway in the home market: the VIC-20. We’ll discuss that one soon.
