In fact, he started programming on PET. He also made taxman, a pacman clone on apple 2, got to know about through AVGN in tiger electronics video. He worked at HAL all the way till HAL became Nintendo's second party developer. Edit: I said it was acquired by Nintendo which wasn't the case.
While it's true that most people hadn't used a keyboard back when the PET came out, They probably had used a typewriter and the PET keyboard is worse than any typewriter of the time and even ones as far back as 100 years before it.
back in the late 70s, my family had a typewriter, and when my school switched to PETs in the writing lab I did in fact go insane because of the keyboard.
Ah, memories. The PET was the first genuine "microcomputer" I used. Prior to that, computing was done using a steam powered terminal hooked up to a mainframe over the phone line. A giant mechanical Olivetti terminal that weighed as much as a small AFV, and made almost as much noise during operation. The PET was a *huge* relief when you come from that background! Using an IEEE-488 interface was a stroke of genius on the part of the PET designers. This is because the IEEE-488 interface was the standard for scientific instrumentation in the 1980s, and as a consequence, you could plug everything from mass spectrometers to desktop sized centrifuges into the PET, and the PET would drive them with a short program consisting of about 25-30 lines of BASIC. Indeed, I used one to drive a weird piece of industrial engraving machinery in 1983, because the machinery used an IEEE-488 interface, and once you understood what commands to send to the machine, you could drive the machine with a 30-line BASIC program. Plug and Play, 1980s style!
@@IncredibleMD ... I'm talking about 1978. Back then, your computer was a mainframe big enough to need its own air conditioned building, which you accessed via a modem over an old fashioned analogue telephone network built into your terminal. Back then, you didn't walk into a shop and walk out with a laptop, you spent a quarter or a million building an air conditioned room, then another quarter of a million on the computer hardware, which was delivered in a large truck and assembled on site. :) Then, there was the terminal. Which didn't have a screen - the output was printed on a big roll of paper. The terminal also had a paper tape reader/writer, which you used to store your program code on reels of stiff paper tape. Frequently, the terminal was heavy enough to be shipped in sections and assembled on site too, because once completely assembled, you needed a fork lift truck to move it. :) This video clip: ruclips.net/video/DFMQ1qT_RFM/видео.html Shows you the sort of device in question, though the one I used was a massive Olivetti terminal that looked like the sort of thing Charles Babbage would have cooked up in the 19th century. In fact, I've just found a photo of the very same terminal I used back in 1978: retroscoop.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/ollivetti_article.jpg That beast was nearly 200 pounds in weight, by the way. More on the fun and games this involved can be read here: retroscoop.wordpress.com/tag/olivetti-teletype-terminal/ Then, we got our hands on the Commodore PET. In our case, the upscale versions with floppy disc drives. After a year using the terminal the arrival of the PETs was like Star Trek coming to life to students in 1979. Instead of having to nurture fragile paper tapes, we could store dozens of programs on floppy discs. And, we had ... wow, GRAPHICS to play with. Primitive by modern standards, but you could write some fairly playable games in BASIC on the PETs, and if you bothered to learn assembly language, the world was your oyster on those machines. Indeed, seeing a speed comparison between BASIC and assembly language was the launchpad for a LOT of assembly language developers in my college. :) About that comparison ... what would take a BASIC program five minutes to achieve, would be done in a fraction of a second if you wrote the assembly language version instead. With assembly language, you're working directly with the processor instruction set, and the program runs at blitz speed compared to an interpreted language like BASIC, because there's no interpreter over head - the CPU just executes the instructions as fast as it can read them from memory. You don't notice this overhead so much with a modern laptop, because the CPU is running at 2 GHz, you have two or even four processor cores running your code simultaneously, and three levels of caching to speed things up even more. Plus, the PET used an 8-bit 6502 as its CPU: modern laptops have 64-bit CPUs with massive address buses that in some cases will access 256 gigabytes of RAM, assuming you can afford to pay for that largesse of course. On a modern laptop, even JavaScript in a browser will update the display at 50 frames per second or more. Comparing a 1979 PET to a modern laptop, is like comparing the Bleriot monoplane to an SR-71. History can be a fascinating subject if you study it. :)
The "killer poke" originally had a useful purpose: on the older PETs, it would speed up the text display. It was only on the later PETs with the updated design that it would make the video go out of sync and potentially damage the CRT circuitry. After this was discovered, Commodore updated the circuitry to make the CRT immune to the killer poke. So in reality, only a small number of PETs are affected, and actual, verified reports of damage caused by it are rare.
Me too, and I do it every frickin time I catch a video that has a bunch of text on the screen that doesn't get narrated line by line, lol. I'll actually skip back to the very moment the text appears on-screen, and if i don't do this, my brain starts to flip out. I'll lose sleep over it if i don't. Perhaps I should have a chat with a specialist about this.....
+Kurt Angerdinger Commodore *is* his thing. Pretty much the first computer he owned was Commodore. While you are factually correct that the PET was the first of the three to be shown at CES, I still want to point out that the Apple was first *demonstrated* and *went on sale* in July 1976, six months *before* CES, with the first 175 being sold within 9 or 10 months. The Apple II was introduced in April 1977; the PET's official release date was SIX MONTHS LATER, in October 1977. Even Wikipedia lists the PET, TRS-80, and Apple as the "1977 Trinity" (they don't use the words "big three"). Out of those, the PET was actually the *least* successful, selling around 1 million units, compared to 1.5 million TRS-80 Model I's and (eventually) 4 million Apple II's. Keep in mind that I'm talking the number of units sold before the product line was cancelled, not the "total number of units sold by 1981" or whatever. I couldn't find any reference for the Apple II having a "faulty disk controller" (though it wouldn't surprise me). Also, I think you misunderstood the "bad video hardware": Only pixels with an even-numbered X coordinate could be violet or blue, and only pixels with an odd-numbered X coordinate could be green or orange. But black and white can be drawn on *any* pixel.
I can't believe that you missed out some very important computers that actually used the 6502. a) The Terminator in T-1 b) Bender and Flexo from Futurama ;)
I don't know if you knew this already, but he already showed in another video how Bender uses the 6502. It was in the video titled "The basics of BASIC, the programming language of the 1980s. " at 1:32 in.
I remember visiting a friend of a friend who had a Pet way back then. Played a few games on it, didn't seem to take long until we realised it was three in the morning and we'd arrived WELL before midnight. This was my first realisation that computers mess with time..
I really like your long-form videos like this. I would love to see your videos hit the 25-30 minute mark. Especially the history based ones. Great work!
That's the entire point of it I think. Show off your programming skills and pushing the hardware to its limit. If I recall within recent history we got FMV playback on a 6MHz CPU because of these people.
I still remember playing "Star Trek" on a PET in 1977... my teacher had it and we could earn points in class to get time on it. Fun times! Klingons on the screen were the letter "K" and stars were asterisks. It was the first computer I ever had my hands on!
That game turned me into a programmer, I saw it on a friends computer, when out and bought one. The BASIC source code was open and I was able to tear into it. 40 years later I still am a software developer.
@referral madness I am 63 years old and do mainly c#, I do some PHP on Unix/Linux platforms too. Sometimes I feel like I have been modifying that program fro 40 years :)
I remember we had two of these (PET 2001) at my high school when I started there in the early 80s. Most of us had never used a computer before in those days so it was really interesting. We used to call the keyboard a calculator keyboard although I've subsequently learned the proper term is a 'chiclet' keyboard. There were a handful of games with graphics you could play on them even 40 years ago, 'Blitz' was one and there was also a Blackjack game too. That computer room was always in use, especially by the older kids as the school had a row of Honeywell terminals linked to a mainframe plus an RML 480Z and an RML 380Z. All quite awesome back then
Love coming back to this channel after over a year. Very nostalgic and I love learning about these historic machines even though I was never around to see them be released.
Always entertaining to watch these in-depth series of yours. Being an all IBM PC guy originally, I enjoy learning about the period before I started dabbling with computers myself. I find the demo to be particularly amazing. How do they actually code those re-timings of the screen to produce the graphic? Simply a stunning feat! :)
I don't know details on how PET worked, but I guess it's simply a combination of three things: - synching with the video chip, by either asking it for an interrupt or monitoring its internal registers - knowing how many machine cycles are per scanline (probably similar to C64, which had 63-65, depending on model) - changing an appropriate register in the video chip at the appropriate moment during the scanline, similar to CGA low-res mode, used in the 8088 MPH demo for PC
I was an IBM PC person too when I was younger. (and I guess I technically still am), but wow is it ever a contrived architecture to do graphics on. Sure, the modern iterations are OK, but the older ones have some serious issues with their expansion bus and the implications it has for graphics. the ISA bus is terrifyingly slow if you have to do even EGA quality graphics...
KuraIthys Yeah, exactly. But then again, at the time I had no real knowledge about the limitations of the ISA bus and such, other than 16-bit had to be better than 8-bit and I knew how the IRQ and BASE addresses worked. For me, it kinda worked like a charm, after figuring out how to get both my Roland MPU-IPC-T and Sound Blaster Pro to work.
In '87 my elementary school was getting rid of their pets to make room for new tech. My brother and I pooled our money and bought one for $50.I was in 6th grade at the time, but that started my love of graphics and programming. So much water under the bridge since then. Thanks for the trip down memory lane :)
The hospital in my home town had a collection of PETs used in patient records. The story goes that they were installed and left running 24/7 for a few years. At some point they needed to do maintenance and so had to shut them all down. Apparently every last one of them failed immediately when they were all powered back on due to fried power supplies.
Collin Taylor actually if they've been on for a really long time, chances are they won't start back up. I've seen it happen countless times with old pbx systems that used similar power supplies.
Same. I own (and use!) an Amiga 500 now - two years and counting. The experience is part magical, part frustrating, part natural. If I was left with just that Amiga setup working, I would pretty much be able to do what I'm doing on any modern computer - minus surfing the internet (I'd also need a compatible printer).
@@Leofwine Well, accessing the internet is everything these days. ;-) I think you'd be significantly better-positioned if you had at least an Amiga 1200, but to each his own.
I remember that when I bought my first car back in 1990, the car dealership was using a Commodore Pet to print out the details. I was surprised that they would have been using such an old computer back then. That floppy disk is huge. I wonder how much it cost compared to the computer.
The PET is very near to my heart as it was the first real computer my fingers ever touched. It was in the computer lab in my elementary school (same one you went to).
Nice video Thanks. Also note that 6202 was used in many arcade games in the 70s and 80s (ie Asteroids, Missile Command, Tempest, and many more). It is impressive what arcade developers could get the 6502 to do with just 16K-32K rom.
@@gopnikaward3986 I know what the mandela effect is, and I think it's bullshit, but he commented something that had absolutely nothing to do with anything here and that profile image is a meme from about 10 years ago...
I like my chips with D.I.P. 😎 Another great dive into computing history! I also love the fact that you're going off the beaten path of Apple and Microsoft into the wonderful world of Commodore computers! My very first computer experience was a C64, so I'm excited to see the history of that model!
Mary had a little lam whos fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go. So this is an example of an entire screen full of text to show what 1 kilobyte of text would look like. It's hard to believe that you could design a decent world processor that could operate on a 4K machine. You certainly wouldn't be doing the works of William Sgajespear! Y the way, I saw the first episode of The Orville last night. SethMcFarlane di dan interesting job with the series; with the first episode wasn't fantastic but I see a lot of potential in it. So I hope it gets better. After all, CBS has rubbed me the wrong way with how they have treated their fans with the whole axanar issue. So I hope the orville can be the show that Star Trek could have been. I'm just rambling on, trying to fill a screen full of text and I'm almost done. I wonder if anyone will pause to read this nonsense?
I paused to read it. The green, smooth text on the PET screen was surprisingly pleasing to the eye. I just wanted to thank you for these videos. They have been very interesting and excellently put together. Your reverence for the VIC-20, in particular (it was also my first computer) was most touching as well.
The aesthetics though. I absolutely love how they look to this day. Wrote my first programs on a Pet in high school in 1982. Although by the time we could afford our own computers it was Vic 20 or Atari time. :)
In early gradeschool (Grade 2) I edited the game, "lemonade stand," on the PET to remove the ABS() call on the purchase inputs so that you could carry negative quantities and achieve ridiculous scores. The principal wanted to expel me for "destruction of property," even though I never actually saved it anywhere! MFW I realized I was being taught by imbeciles.
I destroyed the contents of dynamic memory. They're just ignorant. This was like, 1983, teachers and principal didn't understand computing. I was about 7 years old; if they actually understood what I did, it would have been a completely different outcome. But fast forward ~15 years, some 13yo indian kid makes a _very_ simple HTML page and he makes the fucking news as a genius. At 13 I was already coding in assembly language, and he needed MARKUP.
@@officermeowmeowfuzzyface4408 Same here man. Started with BASIC at 9 (1984), I was programming in assembler at 11 (1986). Set up the computer lab in my middle school because the teachers had no idea what they were doing (1987). Actually taught a computer class in high school because I knew more than the teacher did, she was little more than just a figure head. Made for an easy elective though.
I started with QBasic at 10 and shortly after, I was programming in Visual Basic .Net. I barely touched assembly, though. That small touch was a little bit of 65c816(6502 based processor) ASM to hack Super Mario World, but only a very little bit.
i need to correct some of the info on the original pet computer. i designed the original pet for a company contracted to commodore called "com log co.". we were based in phoenix,az run by larry hittel who had worked at general electric with chuck peddle as an engineer. i designed the original package working with a pc designer at the office. i was responsible for the final design and had traveled to toronto, can to hand over the design plans to "norco" who built a sheet metal mockup. we also contracted jody numbers, a product designer who made a plastic complete design mockup with a monitor bezel, etc.in scottsdale,az. all the original design was done by com log co. during the spring/summer of 1977.
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999979865403129999999999999798654031299999999999997986540312 bit guy
footrotdog, yes, and Jack Tramiel gave Chuck Peddle only months to design and produce the PET so that it could be presented at a trade show. I am certain that they knew what a computer keyboard should look like, but they ran out of time, and with the size constraints caused by fitting in a tape drive, the keyboard had to be small, at least initially. AND, Commodore was vertically integrated, so they were set up to make all parts of the PET in house, from ICs to the case. I am sure that their calculator group was tasked with hacking up a small keyboard, just as their office furniture group was tasked with designing and making the sheet metal case.
A calculator company plus a semiconductor company. They just used what was available and therefore expedient. Ironically, Jack Tramiel started his career repairing typewriters. 😄
When I worked in a computer shop around 1987-1988 I used to visit a customer who had a PET. Was the full size keyboard with green screen - certainly don't remember the natty little keyboard. They were a garage and car parts place and used their PET for stock control. Was quite fond of that machine as I had only ever seen one there.
"17:15" - an exception to this is the Hercules graphics cards that could kill the monitor by setting a very high refresh rate - did it by mistake at Polytechnic.
The SuperPET was my first computer. It came with all the popular languages from Waterloo; like two forms of BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, APL, COBOL. It got me through a few years of college in the mid 80's for programming, numerical methods, etc. And I learned a ton about programming with it.
@referral madness Transactor means something that undertakes "Transactions". A transaction is a business term for buying and selling, an agreement between two parties which is then enacted. I think Terminal would have possibly made better sense but maybe it was avoided because there were already (dumb) terminals in the computer world and Commodore maybe didn't want their machine confused with one of these. The word transactor may have been more attractive to the business community of the day.
I’ve always been of the opinion that the Commodore CBM systems were undervalued and underrated; they actually did some remarkable things for their time. Due to the IEEE-488/GPIB parallel port, they could daisy change multiple machines, as mentioned, but also transfer data at amazing speeds at the time as well as integrate with any HP GPIB device. Commodore also used a different cassette recording system than most at the time, the common technique at the time was basically recording modem tones onto the tape, Commodore used a straight digital square-wave system. The 8050 floppy drive stored 520K per side on a reversible disk and the 8250 drive was built as a double-sided drive allowing over a megabyte per disk in a dual-drive container and used a variable sectoring system to make better use of outer tracks, in other words, outer tracks carried more data sectors than inner tracks. The worst part was the extra cost of quad-density floppy disks. Probably due to its KIM-1 relationship, my high school had used an old DEC-Writer as the printer for our lab.
My favorite PET game was from a TPUG collection and was called Odyssey in Time. I can't seem to find any trace of it, but it was absolutely incredible.
I was already in high school when the PET came out, although didn't have a home computer until the Tandy 1000A. My computer at school was a DEC PDP-11/20.
It's a sci-fi comedy show. I only saw the trailer but it looked terribly unfunny to me. But seeing that text makes me want an 8-Bit Sci-FI Review channel now :D
I remember using PETs in the computer lab in high school in the early '80s. Thanks for the trip down memory lane and for reminding me why I shuldn't reflect on them with sentimentality.
At my elementary school circa 1983-1986 we had a dozen PET's and a single apple II. I stared at the green flickering screen for hours, and programmed in BASIC! I think they were the 4016 model, regular keyboard, had a speaker, and used an external tape drive with each machine. We also had the huge floppy drive that was "networked" to all the PETs.
I soldered up a Kim1 then bought Pet 2001-8 learned Basic and then 6502 and then added a teletype 43 .. printing stuff was so cool lol.. Later I got a job as a manager of the 'Vic Center' in North Acton (London) and wrote game code to sell huge numbers of Vic 20s and even huger amounts of 64s.. just sharing, good times. Always like dropping in your vids to reminisce and learn stuff too :).. btw.. The Vic Centre was pretty much Commodore (64), Atari 800 and Texas Ti99-4a.. we only really ever sold 64s but I did like how the Atari 900 used DLI and not Sprites.. keep posting and very much in awe of your 8 bit coding of that game - nice one :)
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go. So this is an example of what an entire screen full of text would look like. It's hard to believe that you could design a decent word processor that could operate on a 4K machine. You certainly wouldn't be doing the works of William Shakespeare! By the way, I saw the first episode of The Orville last night. Seth McFarlane did an interesting job with the series; the first episode wasn't fantastic but I see a lot of potential in it. So I hope it gets better. After all, CBS has rubbed me the wrong way with how they have treated their fans with the whole Axanar issue. So I hope The Orville can be the show that Star Trek could have been. I'm just rambling on, trying to fill a screen full of text and I'm almost done. I wonder if anyone will pause to read this nonsense? ... yes. _I will pause to read "this nonsense."_ And take the time to type the whole thing up so that it's easier for some people to read. It's just interesting to see people ramble on to me, I like seeing what they can come up with!
Keep in mind that, at the time the PET was released, there was no such thing as an affordable printer, so word processing was unimportant. My first printer was an Epson MX-80 in the early 80's that cost a TON of money, but it changed my computing goals.
I remember the original PET keyboard. We had some with the original and some PETs with the newer keyboards in our lab, of course no one wanted the original ones. We also had one of those floppy drives for the whole lab. 39 years later and my muscle memory can adapt back to the old commodore keyboard layout
That brought back memories. I learned to program in highschool on 4016s. That ultimately lead to a career as a software developer. I remember poking those block characters into the screen memory. Good times.
The PET will always have a special place in my heart as it was the first microcomputer I ever programmed. It was in high school (we had several 4016 models with cassette drives attached). The most interesting thing I ever did with it was a school project I collaborated with my best friend at the time which was a horse race simulator. It had betting and everything. Was the gem of the PTA meetings. :)
I remember seeing my friend's PET for the first time and falling in love. i don't know why I was so fascinated with the PET, since my VIC-20 and 64 were arguably better computers, but I still wanted one...
The Commodore PET was the first computer I got to program. It was in grade 10; the summer before, I'd bought a book on BASIC and ran the programs in my head after writing them out on paper. Of course, they failed miserably when I actually typed them in, but still... The PET got me started on a 30+ year career in software development.
The Pet 2001 was what I learned to program on. Oh the hours of hand assembling 6502 machine code until I eventually wrote a line by line assembler. What a mis-spent childhood !!
As strange as the original PET keyboard seems today, when I first saw it in my kindergarten classroom, I thought it was the coolest thing ever! Those keys weren’t a bad size for 5 year old fingers, either.
The PET 2001 was the computer on which I first attempted to write a program. It was the one precious day on which they wheeled an actual computer into the school, and we all lined up to type in our little BASIC program and see it run. But we weren't given a chance to fix any syntax errors, so when I got one, that was the end of my turn.
My Mother and stepfather bought one of those Commodore Pets for WAAAAAAY too much money for back in '79. It sat collecting dust because nobody in our family had the want or desire to sit and type in pages of lines of program for it not to work.
You right, not giving the credits Commodore, Tandy, Atari deserves. Commodore 64 128 and Amiga were one of the best, if not the best. The winners writes the history!
And don't leave out the best of the Commodore family, the Amiga 500! Sorry, yeah, I'm the guy who's gonna bester you about the Amiga while this Commodore series lasts :)
Yeah, I had an Amiga 500, 1000, 1200, and 600 at one time. I even had highly modded A500 at one point too. Those things were very impressive beasts and beat the pants off of any PC when they came out. Too bad Commodore's marketing at that time was god awful. They could have been the new standard easily.
The first and foremost competitor for Amiga wasn't PC, but Macintosh (there was also Atari ST, but it was less popular than those two). They were both 68k systems, they were controlled by single companies, they focused on providing superior graphical and sound experience compared to PCs. They were go-to choices for people doing more "artsy" stuff, like publishing, graphics, video editing, music etc. Furthermore, both Apple and Commodore weren't doing well in the early 90s, Commodore didn't survive, Apple did and now they're doing better than ever. Imagine holy wars between Android and amigaPhone.
It isn't surprising that the Atari ST was less popular. It certainly didn't help Atari's case that the original version of BASIC that shipped with the ST was so buggy. For example, try typing X=18.9. On an Atari ST running ST Basic, you get this: function not yet done System error #%N, please restart And other commands like X=39.8 or X=4.725 would crash the computer! When MetaComCo announced they were "one bug away" from releasing a new version, industry wags jokingly wondered "whether Atari has only one more bug to eliminate from ST BASIC or one more to add". So, like I said, a buggy implementation of BASIC certainly did not help the ST's reputation. And +sprybug is correct: What really killed the Amiga was Commodore's marketing. For example, the only magazine that they advertised the Amiga in was Commodore Magazine (their in-house magazine), *which they cancelled* on the grounds that "we're a computer company, not a magazine company". The only television advertisements for the Amiga that I ever saw were made by a local firm named VidCom (who was also the only Amiga retailer within 80 kilometers.)
I was 11 in 1981 when my dad brought home a PET 2001 (he borrowed it from his friend). I took to the PET immediately and learnt to program it using the book 'Freeze Dried Instant Basic'. Eventually we bought the PET (best christmas pressie ever!). At the time the keyboard wasn't an issue. Games used the number pad for navigation. We built a sound device and a joystick for our PET. Got rid of it (sadly) when I upgraded to a better computer.
Hey, man, if I went back to my early 80s childhood, and you had a Commodore, Atari, Nintendo, and so on. You would be my computer hero. I always wanted to be in computers. I was able at school and at my Mom and Dad print shop. Anyways, I eventually became an apprentice IT guy in my family's printing business. However, I took a different educational, military, and law enforcement curving path. Now, I am back into PC programming. However, I never left the computer world. Yup, I kept on building PC gaming computers, playing with PC games, and do some amateur PC programming... Anyhow, an excellent video history of the commodore.
MOS Tech was bought by CBM after the Texas Instruments ruined its calculator bussiness. CBM was then convinced that they couldnt depend on third party chips anymore, like it happend with the calculators and the Texas intruments chip. So, after an injection of capitals, they bought MOS and guaranted no only the CPU but any other critical chip will be in house design and production. By mid 80s they even sustitued the mos simple logic chips 74 and 4000 series with MOS parts. The leverage of MOS and the skills of it people were key to success. The 6502 was a "perfected version of the 6800 with more throughput achieved with a deepr pipeline. But one thing the 6502 perfectd best was the price. Motorola asked 125 dollars for a 6800 when it was launched and MOS ... only 25. To list of system which used the 6502 I would add many arcade systems (if you are a regular mame user you already know) run 6502 as main or secondary processor being the Z80 the clear favorite. (this cabinets could fit up to three CPUs). MOS work on the SID and VIC is a legend, a complete project in 9 months, mostly done on PAPER and tested in parts using partial chips. This is REAL "SILICON VALLEY". VIC II chip also break the integration sacel barrier for MOS type of semiconductor. Apple: A computer for a few, CBM: A computer in every home. A PROPER computer that everyone could afford. A shame that it gaming side was the more recognized. Apple did better them, but was sky expensive. Well different bussines models.
I wont lie you, I searched the expression on Google LOL. not sure is positive or negative tough. Back in the slow days of internet I used to read a lot about CBM story and even a book has been launched. Is an impressive rush fron one year being owner of the market to the next near bankruptcy. But facts like, beating Motorola (at this market) and TI talks about the power of the company. And the in house design capabilities also a big plus, just imagine other systems using of the shelf Z80, SNxxx for soun (dont recal the part), one copying another. Many micros with similar platform. The C64 was something different in any sense. Call me sort of ... "fanatic". I started using the C64 when only 6 years old, magic times that cant you forget. I bought myself three C64 a couple of years ago, repaired the original one. Get the datasettes working fine and adjusted. So did with the 1541. After all of this years and being an adult, still thrilled by this split second the screen is black when you turn on the C64. Yea, is and old piece of HW, is obsolete in terms of power, but, it like old V8, even when it doesnt make much horse power, you feel moved when you gas it. The story is very interesting and many lessons learned and many errors made as well. It a giant that then fell appart. Sort of McDonell Douglas on its last leg. This stories worth to read IMHO. Sorry for being so long to put and idea, I know it is boring to read this "statements" LOL. Cheers. Edit cant added to a sentence.
As Jack Tramiel liked to say "Computers for the Masses not the Classes". The UK equivalent was Sinclair and its use of Ferranti ULAs. A working computer using four chips in 1981 for a fraction of the price of a VIC20. Even I could afford one.
You may be right that most people buying the PET had no experience with a computer before, but probably many if not most of them would have had experience typing on a typewriter. The QWERTY keyboard has barely changed since 1874, so it was still a strange choice in 1977 considering typewriters had been sold with a standard keyboard for over a hundred years by then already.
I was about to type that as well. It looks to me like the keyboard was inspired by a calculator button layout, which of course isn't surprising considering Commodore was already a calculator company.
Yes, it seems like an adapted calculator layout for typing alphabetic characters plus others. The first thing I noted that was odd was the pi symbol on one of the "function" keys. I think IBM had a standardized layout for their terminal keyboards at that time.
The PET was also used by General Dynamics around 1978 to help build the F-16. It was cheaper than the Apple2 (and they didn't need color graphics stuff) - the very first PET's had the superior edition of Microsoft BASIC that had floating point support and other scientific function (not built in matrix operations like the 1975 IBM 5100, but still the main trig functions, log, exp, etc). Apple started with just INTEGER BASIC but eventually did come to Microsoft to collaborate and get the floating point capability. But for running numerical simulations and as a great "interactive calculator" that could store and load programs, the PET was great for science and business from Day 1.
One of the coolest things you could do was tell the disk drive to send a file, and the matching printer to receive the file, with the PET not even involved....
We used to have that disk drive in school connected to all 6 of the PET computers. The teacher warned us only one computer could access the disk drive at a time or something bad would happen. What would actually happen? I never found out.
laughed when I read this.. I remember almost the exact same setup in middle school. I think you'd just get an error message if you tried accessing a busy drive. For a couple devious types in the class, it was a race to see who could send the format ('header') command fastest when someone inserted a disk. ;)
I remember we tried this at school and corrupted disks. In the end we had to call out when we wanted to use it to make sure nobody else sent a command at the same time! What with that and the cassette port blowing up if you plugged/unplugged with the power on, we lost so much work, it was awful.
There was another device called a MUPPET that was also used to daisy-chain PETs to a shared disk drive. Not sure if it changed things, but multiple reads weren't a problem. In my school, we would all rush for the computers, turn them on, then try to simultaneously load up some games. Everyone would type load "$" simultaneously to see the directory and then one person would cheer as the winner who got their list first. Also, we had lots of 80-column SuperPETs. But all the games we had were for 40-column machines. So the first program we loaded was a 40-column emulator that let the games run. Yes, I'm sure we wrote a few BASIC program, but mostly we played "miner" as much as possible.
Yes they had the MUPPET set up, I remember seeing that device with all the ribbon cables running to it. Two of them if I remember right.. with two of those double disk drive units.
I bought a Pet around 1979 for about $1000. I did a lot with it including making a EPROM programmer with software in the Pet's Basic. Also wrote programs in machine language for some hobby projects that also used the 6502. I learned microprocessors with the Pet and as a EE went into machine tool design and also military hardware design. Yes took many many hours of setting in front of the Pet, but if one took away the internet and email what would one be doing with a PC. Gaming is one, but still need the internet. Computers today are plug and play for most all users and they learn little. With the computers of the day of the Pet computers were a learning machine.
Thanks for the vid, David. I just bought a PET from a retired teacher-the last PET in his school’s computer lab that he had salvaged. Coincidentally, this was in Eugene OR, home of the voice synthesis company Covox that you mentioned.
aesthetically the PET is a pure joy. it looks like something straight out of a classic sci-fi movie
Turns out it _is_ something straight out of a classic sci-fi movie. It was in Star Trek!
4K is practically an easy amount of RAM for 1977
Look up the PET prototype, it's possibly even more aesthetically pleasing.
@@Corn0nTheCobb That and the Tektronix 4051 from Battlestar Galactica. Both very cool designs.
K9 of Doctor Who fame too.
Mr. Iwata (President of Nintendo from 2002-2015) was great at programming games on the PET
In fact, he started programming on PET. He also made taxman, a pacman clone on apple 2, got to know about through AVGN in tiger electronics video. He worked at HAL all the way till HAL became Nintendo's second party developer.
Edit: I said it was acquired by Nintendo which wasn't the case.
@@PixelTrik I didn't know that Taxman was made by Iwata. Awesome.
RIP
@CP D2191 Maybe not exactly, but I kind of see what you mean.
Iwata was one of the greatest programmers of all time.
1: Hey I just got a pet!
2: Wow! What is it? A dog? A cat?
1: No, it's a commodore
2: uhm you didn't have to yell m8
1: YES I DID CUZ U SUCK U A** HOLE
I thought the Commodore was a bird in the early 80s to be honest. Doesn't it sound like a type of bird? Anyone?
2: Wtf is a commodore?
1: IT’S A NAVAL RANK!
2: How tf is a pet related to that?
1: Oh, that commodore. It was an old computer company.
2: 🤦♂️
@@drowningin Yes it does
2: You F**king Nerd
While it's true that most people hadn't used a keyboard back when the PET came out, They probably had used a typewriter and the PET keyboard is worse than any typewriter of the time and even ones as far back as 100 years before it.
back in the late 70s, my family had a typewriter, and when my school switched to PETs in the writing lab I did in fact go insane because of the keyboard.
Ah, memories. The PET was the first genuine "microcomputer" I used. Prior to that, computing was done using a steam powered terminal hooked up to a mainframe over the phone line. A giant mechanical Olivetti terminal that weighed as much as a small AFV, and made almost as much noise during operation. The PET was a *huge* relief when you come from that background!
Using an IEEE-488 interface was a stroke of genius on the part of the PET designers. This is because the IEEE-488 interface was the standard for scientific instrumentation in the 1980s, and as a consequence, you could plug everything from mass spectrometers to desktop sized centrifuges into the PET, and the PET would drive them with a short program consisting of about 25-30 lines of BASIC. Indeed, I used one to drive a weird piece of industrial engraving machinery in 1983, because the machinery used an IEEE-488 interface, and once you understood what commands to send to the machine, you could drive the machine with a 30-line BASIC program. Plug and Play, 1980s style!
huh
What kinda Diselpunk setting did you come from, bro?
@@IncredibleMD ... I'm talking about 1978. Back then, your computer was a mainframe big enough to need its own air conditioned building, which you accessed via a modem over an old fashioned analogue telephone network built into your terminal. Back then, you didn't walk into a shop and walk out with a laptop, you spent a quarter or a million building an air conditioned room, then another quarter of a million on the computer hardware, which was delivered in a large truck and assembled on site. :)
Then, there was the terminal. Which didn't have a screen - the output was printed on a big roll of paper. The terminal also had a paper tape reader/writer, which you used to store your program code on reels of stiff paper tape. Frequently, the terminal was heavy enough to be shipped in sections and assembled on site too, because once completely assembled, you needed a fork lift truck to move it. :)
This video clip:
ruclips.net/video/DFMQ1qT_RFM/видео.html
Shows you the sort of device in question, though the one I used was a massive Olivetti terminal that looked like the sort of thing Charles Babbage would have cooked up in the 19th century. In fact, I've just found a photo of the very same terminal I used back in 1978:
retroscoop.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/ollivetti_article.jpg
That beast was nearly 200 pounds in weight, by the way. More on the fun and games this involved can be read here:
retroscoop.wordpress.com/tag/olivetti-teletype-terminal/
Then, we got our hands on the Commodore PET. In our case, the upscale versions with floppy disc drives. After a year using the terminal the arrival of the PETs was like Star Trek coming to life to students in 1979. Instead of having to nurture fragile paper tapes, we could store dozens of programs on floppy discs. And, we had ... wow, GRAPHICS to play with. Primitive by modern standards, but you could write some fairly playable games in BASIC on the PETs, and if you bothered to learn assembly language, the world was your oyster on those machines. Indeed, seeing a speed comparison between BASIC and assembly language was the launchpad for a LOT of assembly language developers in my college. :)
About that comparison ... what would take a BASIC program five minutes to achieve, would be done in a fraction of a second if you wrote the assembly language version instead. With assembly language, you're working directly with the processor instruction set, and the program runs at blitz speed compared to an interpreted language like BASIC, because there's no interpreter over head - the CPU just executes the instructions as fast as it can read them from memory.
You don't notice this overhead so much with a modern laptop, because the CPU is running at 2 GHz, you have two or even four processor cores running your code simultaneously, and three levels of caching to speed things up even more. Plus, the PET used an 8-bit 6502 as its CPU: modern laptops have 64-bit CPUs with massive address buses that in some cases will access 256 gigabytes of RAM, assuming you can afford to pay for that largesse of course. On a modern laptop, even JavaScript in a browser will update the display at 50 frames per second or more. Comparing a 1979 PET to a modern laptop, is like comparing the Bleriot monoplane to an SR-71.
History can be a fascinating subject if you study it. :)
Comments like these are literal gold
@@Calilasseia thank you very much for the explanations!
WARNING if you feed the PET chips after midnight it will byte you!
Well that explains alot lol
how shocking! should i POKE it if it tries to byte?
pet the pet
Really? Because when I fed mine it RAMed into me.
If the PET bytes you, does that mean you got bit 8 times?
The "killer poke" originally had a useful purpose: on the older PETs, it would speed up the text display. It was only on the later PETs with the updated design that it would make the video go out of sync and potentially damage the CRT circuitry. After this was discovered, Commodore updated the circuitry to make the CRT immune to the killer poke. So in reality, only a small number of PETs are affected, and actual, verified reports of damage caused by it are rare.
well ddddddaaaammmmm
Wow
Is that why facebook got rid of poking?
So I’m not the only one that already knew that
bro why arent u verified been watching your good videos for a long time really like those easy listening videos dont know if youll ever see this
I remember the pet in 3rd grade. We had a manual typewriter at home so yes I instantly recognized the keyboard was ridiculous.
7:00 Yes, I paused to read that nonsense ;-)
Me too! Like if u like Orville lol
I stopped to read it as well
Me too, and I do it every frickin time I catch a video that has a bunch of text on the screen that doesn't get narrated line by line, lol. I'll actually skip back to the very moment the text appears on-screen, and if i don't do this, my brain starts to flip out. I'll lose sleep over it if i don't. Perhaps I should have a chat with a specialist about this.....
shakespear! y the way
This is the computer that Satoru Iwata started out on when he decided to get into programming.
Superb! You weren't kidding when you said that Commodore's history has been largely overlooked.
Yep, Commodore were a big part of the reason ppl could afford to have a computer in the house.
Worked for our household, when my older brother saved up to get his Commodore 128, I got his VIC-20 as a hand me down.
+Kurt Angerdinger Commodore *is* his thing. Pretty much the first computer he owned was Commodore.
While you are factually correct that the PET was the first of the three to be shown at CES, I still want to point out that the Apple was first *demonstrated* and *went on sale* in July 1976, six months *before* CES, with the first 175 being sold within 9 or 10 months. The Apple II was introduced in April 1977; the PET's official release date was SIX MONTHS LATER, in October 1977.
Even Wikipedia lists the PET, TRS-80, and Apple as the "1977 Trinity" (they don't use the words "big three"). Out of those, the PET was actually the *least* successful, selling around 1 million units, compared to 1.5 million TRS-80 Model I's and (eventually) 4 million Apple II's. Keep in mind that I'm talking the number of units sold before the product line was cancelled, not the "total number of units sold by 1981" or whatever.
I couldn't find any reference for the Apple II having a "faulty disk controller" (though it wouldn't surprise me). Also, I think you misunderstood the "bad video hardware": Only pixels with an even-numbered X coordinate could be violet or blue, and only pixels with an odd-numbered X coordinate could be green or orange. But black and white can be drawn on *any* pixel.
Apple been lying about its importance since 1977, basically.
Commodore: "The PET cannot display graphics"
Demoscene: "Hold my beer..."
^_^
Of course it can, where do you think petskii originally came from, LOL
PET was THE first computer of Satoru Iwata (R.I.P.) CEO of Nintendo.
Those crazy dudes never fail to impress. Just when you think you've seen every hack...
Speccy fans: The commodore 64 cannot do vector graphics properly
Norbert Kehrer: Hold my beer
I can't believe that you missed out some very important computers that actually used the 6502.
a) The Terminator in T-1
b) Bender and Flexo from Futurama
;)
Lol
I don't know if you knew this already, but he already showed in another video how Bender uses the 6502. It was in the video titled "The basics of BASIC, the programming language of the 1980s.
" at 1:32 in.
A big thank you for mentioning the BBC Micro. That was huge in the UK. Love the 6502, it has lovely op-codes.
I remember visiting a friend of a friend who had a Pet way back then. Played a few games on it, didn't seem to take long until we realised it was three in the morning and we'd arrived WELL before midnight. This was my first realisation that computers mess with time..
I really like your long-form videos like this. I would love to see your videos hit the 25-30 minute mark. Especially the history based ones. Great work!
The Demoscene has some truly mythical programming skills
Nora the Antipaladin They are god damn wizards
That's the entire point of it I think. Show off your programming skills and pushing the hardware to its limit. If I recall within recent history we got FMV playback on a 6MHz CPU because of these people.
I was blown away by the demos too.
The Demoscene happens when you forgot to tell the coder that something is not possible on a machine. :)
I still remember playing "Star Trek" on a PET in 1977... my teacher had it and we could earn points in class to get time on it. Fun times! Klingons on the screen were the letter "K" and stars were asterisks. It was the first computer I ever had my hands on!
who pays star trek. EVERYONE PLAY NEO PETS *gasp* i said pet and it it makes no sense
@@funnytree6197 no
That game turned me into a programmer, I saw it on a friends computer, when out and bought one. The BASIC source code was open and I was able to tear into it. 40 years later I still am a software developer.
When Kirk has the PET in the movie, he should have had the 'Star Trek' game displayed on it. Imagine Kirk and Spock playing 'Star Trek' on a PET !
@referral madness I am 63 years old and do mainly c#, I do some PHP on Unix/Linux platforms too. Sometimes I feel like I have been modifying that program fro 40 years :)
I remember we had two of these (PET 2001) at my high school when I started there in the early 80s. Most of us had never used a computer before in those days so it was really interesting. We used to call the keyboard a calculator keyboard although I've subsequently learned the proper term is a 'chiclet' keyboard. There were a handful of games with graphics you could play on them even 40 years ago, 'Blitz' was one and there was also a Blackjack game too. That computer room was always in use, especially by the older kids as the school had a row of Honeywell terminals linked to a mainframe plus an RML 480Z and an RML 380Z. All quite awesome back then
Love coming back to this channel after over a year. Very nostalgic and I love learning about these historic machines even though I was never around to see them be released.
Always entertaining to watch these in-depth series of yours. Being an all IBM PC guy originally, I enjoy learning about the period before I started dabbling with computers myself. I find the demo to be particularly amazing. How do they actually code those re-timings of the screen to produce the graphic? Simply a stunning feat! :)
Yeah, that demo is truly amazing - you wouldn't know that it doesn't have any graphics modes from watching that demo.
I don't know details on how PET worked, but I guess it's simply a combination of three things:
- synching with the video chip, by either asking it for an interrupt or monitoring its internal registers
- knowing how many machine cycles are per scanline (probably similar to C64, which had 63-65, depending on model)
- changing an appropriate register in the video chip at the appropriate moment during the scanline, similar to CGA low-res mode, used in the 8088 MPH demo for PC
Anders Enger Jensen I'm here for the music
I was an IBM PC person too when I was younger. (and I guess I technically still am), but wow is it ever a contrived architecture to do graphics on.
Sure, the modern iterations are OK, but the older ones have some serious issues with their expansion bus and the implications it has for graphics.
the ISA bus is terrifyingly slow if you have to do even EGA quality graphics...
KuraIthys Yeah, exactly. But then again, at the time I had no real knowledge about the limitations of the ISA bus and such, other than 16-bit had to be better than 8-bit and I knew how the IRQ and BASE addresses worked. For me, it kinda worked like a charm, after figuring out how to get both my Roland MPU-IPC-T and Sound Blaster Pro to work.
In '87 my elementary school was getting rid of their pets to make room for new tech. My brother and I pooled our money and bought one for $50.I was in 6th grade at the time, but that started my love of graphics and programming. So much water under the bridge since then. Thanks for the trip down memory lane :)
The hospital in my home town had a collection of PETs used in patient records. The story goes that they were installed and left running 24/7 for a few years. At some point they needed to do maintenance and so had to shut them all down. Apparently every last one of them failed immediately when they were all powered back on due to fried power supplies.
ruclips.net/video/_4_LJKTkN3s/видео.html Fifteen minutes in there is a PET hard at work in another Hospital.
Doesn't sound very believable. Power supplies wouldn't all get fried at the same time. Can't believe 19 people believed this story.
Collin Taylor actually if they've been on for a really long time, chances are they won't start back up. I've seen it happen countless times with old pbx systems that used similar power supplies.
Collin can’t believe 1 person liked your reply
I wasn’t born until 1993, long after Commodore’s heyday and yet this still feels nostalgic
Same.
I own (and use!) an Amiga 500 now - two years and counting. The experience is part magical, part frustrating, part natural.
If I was left with just that Amiga setup working, I would pretty much be able to do what I'm doing on any modern computer - minus surfing the internet (I'd also need a compatible printer).
@@Leofwine Well, accessing the internet is everything these days. ;-)
I think you'd be significantly better-positioned if you had at least an Amiga 1200, but to each his own.
Anyone else 'pause to read this nonsense?' like i did?
I remember that when I bought my first car back in 1990, the car dealership was using a Commodore Pet to print out the details. I was surprised that they would have been using such an old computer back then.
That floppy disk is huge. I wonder how much it cost compared to the computer.
Many people who bought a Commodore PET had learned to type on a manual typewriter! That keyboard would have been strange to them.
The PET is very near to my heart as it was the first real computer my fingers ever touched. It was in the computer lab in my elementary school (same one you went to).
hi geekpub
TheGeekPub TRS80 was the first computer my fingers touched in my 8th grade computer intro class.
Me too! I played that lawnmower game!
TheGeekPub youre top commment on all this guys vids
go away
Nice video Thanks. Also note that 6202 was used in many arcade games in the 70s and 80s (ie Asteroids, Missile Command, Tempest, and many more). It is impressive what arcade developers could get the 6502 to do with just 16K-32K rom.
So the KIM-1 is basically the granddaddy of Raspberry Pi? :P
No
Yes
@@nyccollin What the fuck are you talking about?
@@gopnikaward3986 I know what the mandela effect is, and I think it's bullshit, but he commented something that had absolutely nothing to do with anything here and that profile image is a meme from about 10 years ago...
A single board computer popular with hobbyists and engineers - yep, sounds about right
I like my chips with D.I.P. 😎
Another great dive into computing history! I also love the fact that you're going off the beaten path of Apple and Microsoft into the wonderful world of Commodore computers! My very first computer experience was a C64, so I'm excited to see the history of that model!
Mary had a little lam whos fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go. So this is an example of an entire screen full of text to show what 1 kilobyte of text would look like. It's hard to believe that you could design a decent world processor that could operate on a 4K machine. You certainly wouldn't be doing the works of William Sgajespear! Y the way, I saw the first episode of The Orville last night. SethMcFarlane di dan interesting job with the series; with the first episode wasn't fantastic but I see a lot of potential in it. So I hope it gets better. After all, CBS has rubbed me the wrong way with how they have treated their fans with the whole axanar issue. So I hope the orville can be the show that Star Trek could have been. I'm just rambling on, trying to fill a screen full of text and I'm almost done. I wonder if anyone will pause to read this nonsense?
Love me a good world processor...
viva les geeks
Me
/r/copypasta
Nice speech.
It's interesting to see so many of the odd quirks of the iconic C64 came from the Pet.
I paused to read it. The green, smooth text on the PET screen was surprisingly pleasing to the eye. I just wanted to thank you for these videos. They have been very interesting and excellently put together. Your reverence for the VIC-20, in particular (it was also my first computer) was most touching as well.
Я не знаю что он сказал
The aesthetics though. I absolutely love how they look to this day. Wrote my first programs on a Pet in high school in 1982. Although by the time we could afford our own computers it was Vic 20 or Atari time. :)
In early gradeschool (Grade 2) I edited the game, "lemonade stand," on the PET to remove the ABS() call on the purchase inputs so that you could carry negative quantities and achieve ridiculous scores. The principal wanted to expel me for "destruction of property," even though I never actually saved it anywhere!
MFW I realized I was being taught by imbeciles.
I destroyed the contents of dynamic memory. They're just ignorant. This was like, 1983, teachers and principal didn't understand computing. I was about 7 years old; if they actually understood what I did, it would have been a completely different outcome. But fast forward ~15 years, some 13yo indian kid makes a _very_ simple HTML page and he makes the fucking news as a genius. At 13 I was already coding in assembly language, and he needed MARKUP.
@@officermeowmeowfuzzyface4408
Same here man. Started with BASIC at 9 (1984), I was programming in assembler at 11 (1986). Set up the computer lab in my middle school because the teachers had no idea what they were doing (1987). Actually taught a computer class in high school because I knew more than the teacher did, she was little more than just a figure head. Made for an easy elective though.
I started with QBasic at 10 and shortly after, I was programming in Visual Basic .Net. I barely touched assembly, though. That small touch was a little bit of 65c816(6502 based processor) ASM to hack Super Mario World, but only a very little bit.
I am 13 and I'm still learning c++!
Let me tell you something.
Nothing has changed, faculty still can't/don't want to understand basic computing...
New 8-Bit Guy episode, this will be a good evening!
It's only 20min, how many times are you going to watch it? :)
“Calculators are a dead business” Texas Instruments: I think not!!!
TI tried computers and failed, calculators were all they had left.
texas instruments managed to make a gaming calculator
Only because the US Government support their monopoly in schools
i need to correct some of the info on the original pet computer. i designed the original pet for a company contracted to commodore called "com log co.". we were based in phoenix,az run by larry hittel who had worked at general electric with chuck peddle as an engineer. i designed the original package working with a pc designer at the office. i was responsible for the final design and had traveled to toronto, can to hand over the design plans to "norco" who built a sheet metal mockup. we also contracted jody numbers, a product designer who made a plastic complete design mockup with a monitor bezel, etc.in scottsdale,az. all the original design was done by com log co. during the spring/summer of 1977.
2020:
*The 8-Bit Guy*
2063:
*The 64-Bit Guy*
3000:
The Quantum Guy
4000: The 4K guy
2130:
The 128-Bit Guy
5000: The 8K Guy.
7986540312999999999999979865403129999999999999798654031299999999999997986540312999999999999999999999999997986540312798654031299999999999997986540312999999999999999999999999997986540312999999999999979865403129999999999999798654031299999999999997986540312999999999999979865403129999999999999798654031299999999999997986540312999999999999999999999999997986540312798654031299999999999997986540312999999999999979865403129999999999999798654031299999999999997986540312:
The 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999979865403129999999999999798654031299999999999997986540312 bit guy
Chuck Peddle died on December 15, 2019... :(
That keyboard makes perfect sense when you consider that the PET was a first attempt at built a PC from a Calculator company.
footrotdog, yes, and Jack Tramiel gave Chuck Peddle only months to design and produce the PET so that it could be presented at a trade show.
I am certain that they knew what a computer keyboard should look like, but they ran out of time, and with the size constraints caused by fitting in a tape drive, the keyboard had to be small, at least initially. AND, Commodore was vertically integrated, so they were set up to make all parts of the PET in house, from ICs to the case. I am sure that their calculator group was tasked with hacking up a small keyboard, just as their office furniture group was tasked with designing and making the sheet metal case.
A calculator company plus a semiconductor company. They just used what was available and therefore expedient. Ironically, Jack Tramiel started his career repairing typewriters. 😄
David: Complaints about the pet
David's Shirt: I LOVE MY PET
This is still awesome entertainment in 2019.
Thanks from Denmark hope this stuff gets stored forever
When I worked in a computer shop around 1987-1988 I used to visit a customer who had a PET. Was the full size keyboard with green screen - certainly don't remember the natty little keyboard. They were a garage and car parts place and used their PET for stock control. Was quite fond of that machine as I had only ever seen one there.
"17:15" - an exception to this is the Hercules graphics cards that could kill the monitor by setting a very high refresh rate - did it by mistake at Polytechnic.
17:44 If anyone is curious, it doesn't work on PET 2001 ;)
"POKE 59458,62"
The
"@echo off
del c:\WINDOWS\system32"
of the 70s
except you can't just reinstall the os
yep
POKE: ded
.BAT FILE: 0xDEADDEAD
I remember walking through Grace Brothers here in Sydney in 1978 and seeing the PET. Man, that thing looked sooo space age.
The SuperPET was my first computer. It came with all the popular languages from Waterloo; like two forms of BASIC, PASCAL, FORTRAN, APL, COBOL. It got me through a few years of college in the mid 80's for programming, numerical methods, etc. And I learned a ton about programming with it.
When I get a 3D printer, I want to make a Commodore PET shell to put my computer parts in, it's such a nice looking machine.
Not fun???!! I can't tell you how many hours of fun I've had with a PET! Also, you didn't say what PET stands for: Personal Electronic Transactor.
@John Ross I have an original late seventies PET flyer and can confirm it is Transactor. At least in the UK.
@referral madness Transactor means something that undertakes "Transactions". A transaction is a business term for buying and selling, an agreement between two parties which is then enacted. I think Terminal would have possibly made better sense but maybe it was avoided because there were already (dumb) terminals in the computer world and Commodore maybe didn't want their machine confused with one of these. The word transactor may have been more attractive to the business community of the day.
The 8-Bit Guy: *does the killer poke on the Obsolete Geek's pet*
The Obsolete Geek: So you have chosen death.
No biggie, the Killer POKE wouldn't affect that PET.
I like memes, so no one cares, lol.
@@WildDiamond07 yes, no one gives a shit about you liking memes.
I know. Not even me or my soul.
I’ve always been of the opinion that the Commodore CBM systems were undervalued and underrated; they actually did some remarkable things for their time.
Due to the IEEE-488/GPIB parallel port, they could daisy change multiple machines, as mentioned, but also transfer data at amazing speeds at the time as well as integrate with any HP GPIB device.
Commodore also used a different cassette recording system than most at the time, the common technique at the time was basically recording modem tones onto the tape, Commodore used a straight digital square-wave system.
The 8050 floppy drive stored 520K per side on a reversible disk and the 8250 drive was built as a double-sided drive allowing over a megabyte per disk in a dual-drive container and used a variable sectoring system to make better use of outer tracks, in other words, outer tracks carried more data sectors than inner tracks. The worst part was the extra cost of quad-density floppy disks.
Probably due to its KIM-1 relationship, my high school had used an old DEC-Writer as the printer for our lab.
My favorite PET game was from a TPUG collection and was called Odyssey in Time. I can't seem to find any trace of it, but it was absolutely incredible.
10 PRINT "Ｆ ON CHUCK PEDDLE (1937-2019)"
20 GOTO 10
F for*
@@miko8732 F is for flowers!.... sorry had to do it!
Crazy Coinbox f is for friends who do stuff together!
@@backwardsface3046 U is for you and me!
Send this video to the teenagers who use their PCs to say "Damn i wish i was born in the 60s"
+Caffeine Addict: I spent my childhood in the 70s (and early 80's, which was even worse...:), and yes, early home computers were dope as hell ;-)
I'm from the '70s ('4 to be exact). My first experience with a computer was when I was in kindergarten ('79), when the PET was already 2 years old.
I was already in high school when the PET came out, although didn't have a home computer until the Tandy 1000A. My computer at school was a DEC PDP-11/20.
18:37
I paused to read that nonsense
I too paused to read the 1k text. :) BTW.What's that TV series, some interesting S-F maybe?
It's a sci-fi comedy show. I only saw the trailer but it looked terribly unfunny to me. But seeing that text makes me want an 8-Bit Sci-FI Review channel now :D
so did i
same
me too
I remember using PETs in the computer lab in high school in the early '80s. Thanks for the trip down memory lane and for reminding me why I shuldn't reflect on them with sentimentality.
While some are productive and create something, others need to upload videos about old technology to get a touch of recognition. My sincere sympathy.
that orb demo was crazy!
That wave demo especially blew me away. So simple, but seems impossible on a machine that can only display characters.
At my elementary school circa 1983-1986 we had a dozen PET's and a single apple II. I stared at the green flickering screen for hours, and programmed in BASIC! I think they were the 4016 model, regular keyboard, had a speaker, and used an external tape drive with each machine. We also had the huge floppy drive that was "networked" to all the PETs.
I love your intro jingle. It sounds so much like old 80's infomercials, which has a warm place in my heart ❤
I always thought the same thing!
Me too, but it took me a while. At beginning I was like "yeah, funny. Like in those old TV shows..." Now I love it😊
I love this series. Watch it when I can.
I soldered up a Kim1 then bought Pet 2001-8 learned Basic and then 6502 and then added a teletype 43 .. printing stuff was so cool lol.. Later I got a job as a manager of the 'Vic Center' in North Acton (London) and wrote game code to sell huge numbers of Vic 20s and even huger amounts of 64s.. just sharing, good times. Always like dropping in your vids to reminisce and learn stuff too :).. btw.. The Vic Centre was pretty much Commodore (64), Atari 800 and Texas Ti99-4a.. we only really ever sold 64s but I did like how the Atari 900 used DLI and not Sprites.. keep posting and very much in awe of your 8 bit coding of that game - nice one :)
Atari 900 lol oops
You should do a episode on a Epson computer!
my first computer was a pet that space invader game and those sounds brought back tons of memories
Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow. Everywhere that Mary went the lamb was sure to go.
So this is an example of what an entire screen full of text would look like. It's hard to believe that you could design a decent word processor that could operate on a 4K machine. You certainly wouldn't be doing the works of William Shakespeare!
By the way, I saw the first episode of The Orville last night. Seth McFarlane did an interesting job with the series; the first episode wasn't fantastic but I see a lot of potential in it. So I hope it gets better. After all, CBS has rubbed me the wrong way with how they have treated their fans with the whole Axanar issue. So I hope The Orville can be the show that Star Trek could have been.
I'm just rambling on, trying to fill a screen full of text and I'm almost done. I wonder if anyone will pause to read this nonsense?
... yes. _I will pause to read "this nonsense."_ And take the time to type the whole thing up so that it's easier for some people to read. It's just interesting to see people ramble on to me, I like seeing what they can come up with!
Sadie Blackwell
"By" needs to be "Y"
He made a typo
Keep in mind that, at the time the PET was released, there was no such thing as an affordable printer, so word processing was unimportant. My first printer was an Epson MX-80 in the early 80's that cost a TON of money, but it changed my computing goals.
I was gonna go to type this up myself, but since I remembered taht comments are WIERD, so I searched for what started with "Mary had a little lamb"
I remember the original PET keyboard. We had some with the original and some PETs with the newer keyboards in our lab, of course no one wanted the original ones. We also had one of those floppy drives for the whole lab. 39 years later and my muscle memory can adapt back to the old commodore keyboard layout
That brought back memories. I learned to program in highschool on 4016s. That ultimately lead to a career as a software developer. I remember poking those block characters into the screen memory. Good times.
The PET will always have a special place in my heart as it was the first microcomputer I ever programmed. It was in high school (we had several 4016 models with cassette drives attached). The most interesting thing I ever did with it was a school project I collaborated with my best friend at the time which was a horse race simulator. It had betting and everything. Was the gem of the PTA meetings. :)
I remember seeing my friend's PET for the first time and falling in love. i don't know why I was so fascinated with the PET, since my VIC-20 and 64 were arguably better computers, but I still wanted one...
17:54 LOL, I love this scene. It's very well made and executed! It makes me laugh every time.
The Commodore PET was the first computer I got to program. It was in grade 10; the summer before, I'd bought a book on BASIC and ran the programs in my head after writing them out on paper.
Of course, they failed miserably when I actually typed them in, but still... The PET got me started on a 30+ year career in software development.
The Pet 2001 was what I learned to program on. Oh the hours of hand assembling 6502 machine code until I eventually wrote a line by line assembler. What a mis-spent childhood !!
As strange as the original PET keyboard seems today, when I first saw it in my kindergarten classroom, I thought it was the coolest thing ever! Those keys weren’t a bad size for 5 year old fingers, either.
That demo looks great! Does it need more than 4K of RAM? Btw great video I hope you upload the other parts soon!
I'm curious to know your background? you program and repair hardware. were you educated in IT?
He worked in IT support or something similar
@@FLUFFSQUEAKER thx
check his latest video :) he pretty much answers your question
The PET 2001 was the computer on which I first attempted to write a program. It was the one precious day on which they wheeled an actual computer into the school, and we all lined up to type in our little BASIC program and see it run. But we weren't given a chance to fix any syntax errors, so when I got one, that was the end of my turn.
My Mother and stepfather bought one of those Commodore Pets for WAAAAAAY too much money for back in '79. It sat collecting dust because nobody in our family had the want or desire to sit and type in pages of lines of program for it not to work.
You right, not giving the credits Commodore, Tandy, Atari deserves.
Commodore 64 128 and Amiga were one of the best, if not the best.
The winners writes the history!
And don't leave out the best of the Commodore family, the Amiga 500! Sorry, yeah, I'm the guy who's gonna bester you about the Amiga while this Commodore series lasts :)
I'll probably finish it up with the A1000 and 500.. unfortunately I don't have a 2000 to show.
Oh, what about a A1200? A superb machine. I used to own one up to 94. :(
Yeah, I had an Amiga 500, 1000, 1200, and 600 at one time. I even had highly modded A500 at one point too. Those things were very impressive beasts and beat the pants off of any PC when they came out. Too bad Commodore's marketing at that time was god awful. They could have been the new standard easily.
The first and foremost competitor for Amiga wasn't PC, but Macintosh (there was also Atari ST, but it was less popular than those two). They were both 68k systems, they were controlled by single companies, they focused on providing superior graphical and sound experience compared to PCs. They were go-to choices for people doing more "artsy" stuff, like publishing, graphics, video editing, music etc. Furthermore, both Apple and Commodore weren't doing well in the early 90s, Commodore didn't survive, Apple did and now they're doing better than ever.
Imagine holy wars between Android and amigaPhone.
It isn't surprising that the Atari ST was less popular. It certainly didn't help Atari's case that the original version of BASIC that shipped with the ST was so buggy. For example, try typing X=18.9. On an Atari ST running ST Basic, you get this:
function not yet done
System error #%N, please restart
And other commands like X=39.8 or X=4.725 would crash the computer! When MetaComCo announced they were "one bug away" from releasing a new version, industry wags jokingly wondered "whether Atari has only one more bug to eliminate from ST BASIC or one more to add".
So, like I said, a buggy implementation of BASIC certainly did not help the ST's reputation. And +sprybug is correct: What really killed the Amiga was Commodore's marketing. For example, the only magazine that they advertised the Amiga in was Commodore Magazine (their in-house magazine), *which they cancelled* on the grounds that "we're a computer company, not a magazine company". The only television advertisements for the Amiga that I ever saw were made by a local firm named VidCom (who was also the only Amiga retailer within 80 kilometers.)
I was 11 in 1981 when my dad brought home a PET 2001 (he borrowed it from his friend). I took to the PET immediately and learnt to program it using the book 'Freeze Dried Instant Basic'. Eventually we bought the PET (best christmas pressie ever!). At the time the keyboard wasn't an issue. Games used the number pad for navigation. We built a sound device and a joystick for our PET. Got rid of it (sadly) when I upgraded to a better computer.
Hey, man, if I went back to my early 80s childhood, and you had a Commodore, Atari, Nintendo, and so on. You would be my computer hero. I always wanted to be in computers. I was able at school and at my Mom and Dad print shop. Anyways, I eventually became an apprentice IT guy in my family's printing business. However, I took a different educational, military, and law enforcement curving path. Now, I am back into PC programming. However, I never left the computer world. Yup, I kept on building PC gaming computers, playing with PC games, and do some amateur PC programming... Anyhow, an excellent video history of the commodore.
This is a real trip down memory lane for me! The PET was my first exposure to desktop computers back in my high school days in the early 1980s.
Booooooooring
MOS Tech was bought by CBM after the Texas Instruments ruined its calculator bussiness. CBM was then convinced that they couldnt depend on third party chips anymore, like it happend with the calculators and the Texas intruments chip. So, after an injection of capitals, they bought MOS and guaranted no only the CPU but any other critical chip will be in house design and production. By mid 80s they even sustitued the mos simple logic chips 74 and 4000 series with MOS parts. The leverage of MOS and the skills of it people were key to success. The 6502 was a "perfected version of the 6800 with more throughput achieved with a deepr pipeline. But one thing the 6502 perfectd best was the price. Motorola asked 125 dollars for a 6800 when it was launched and MOS ... only 25. To list of system which used the 6502 I would add many arcade systems (if you are a regular mame user you already know) run 6502 as main or secondary processor being the Z80 the clear favorite. (this cabinets could fit up to three CPUs). MOS work on the SID and VIC is a legend, a complete project in 9 months, mostly done on PAPER and tested in parts using partial chips. This is REAL "SILICON VALLEY". VIC II chip also break the integration sacel barrier for MOS type of semiconductor. Apple: A computer for a few, CBM: A computer in every home. A PROPER computer that everyone could afford. A shame that it gaming side was the more recognized. Apple did better them, but was sky expensive. Well different bussines models.
38911bytefree You da real MVP
I wont lie you, I searched the expression on Google LOL. not sure is positive or negative tough. Back in the slow days of internet I used to read a lot about CBM story and even a book has been launched. Is an impressive rush fron one year being owner of the market to the next near bankruptcy. But facts like, beating Motorola (at this market) and TI talks about the power of the company. And the in house design capabilities also a big plus, just imagine other systems using of the shelf Z80, SNxxx for soun (dont recal the part), one copying another. Many micros with similar platform. The C64 was something different in any sense. Call me sort of ... "fanatic". I started using the C64 when only 6 years old, magic times that cant you forget. I bought myself three C64 a couple of years ago, repaired the original one. Get the datasettes working fine and adjusted. So did with the 1541. After all of this years and being an adult, still thrilled by this split second the screen is black when you turn on the C64. Yea, is and old piece of HW, is obsolete in terms of power, but, it like old V8, even when it doesnt make much horse power, you feel moved when you gas it. The story is very interesting and many lessons learned and many errors made as well. It a giant that then fell appart. Sort of McDonell Douglas on its last leg. This stories worth to read IMHO. Sorry for being so long to put and idea, I know it is boring to read this "statements" LOL. Cheers. Edit cant added to a sentence.
As Jack Tramiel liked to say "Computers for the Masses not the Classes". The UK equivalent was Sinclair and its use of Ferranti ULAs. A working computer using four chips in 1981 for a fraction of the price of a VIC20. Even I could afford one.
And MOS Tech's factory eventually became a superfund site :(
You may be right that most people buying the PET had no experience with a computer before, but probably many if not most of them would have had experience typing on a typewriter. The QWERTY keyboard has barely changed since 1874, so it was still a strange choice in 1977 considering typewriters had been sold with a standard keyboard for over a hundred years by then already.
I was about to type that as well. It looks to me like the keyboard was inspired by a calculator button layout, which of course isn't surprising considering Commodore was already a calculator company.
Yes, it seems like an adapted calculator layout for typing alphabetic characters plus others. The first thing I noted that was odd was the pi symbol on one of the "function" keys. I think IBM had a standardized layout for their terminal keyboards at that time.
The PET was also used by General Dynamics around 1978 to help build the F-16. It was cheaper than the Apple2 (and they didn't need color graphics stuff) - the very first PET's had the superior edition of Microsoft BASIC that had floating point support and other scientific function (not built in matrix operations like the 1975 IBM 5100, but still the main trig functions, log, exp, etc). Apple started with just INTEGER BASIC but eventually did come to Microsoft to collaborate and get the floating point capability. But for running numerical simulations and as a great "interactive calculator" that could store and load programs, the PET was great for science and business from Day 1.
Great videos, I love the simplicity of the 8 bit days
One of the coolest things you could do was tell the disk drive to send a file, and the matching printer to receive the file, with the PET not even involved....
We used to have that disk drive in school connected to all 6 of the PET computers. The teacher warned us only one computer could access the disk drive at a time or something bad would happen. What would actually happen? I never found out.
laughed when I read this.. I remember almost the exact same setup in middle school. I think you'd just get an error message if you tried accessing a busy drive. For a couple devious types in the class, it was a race to see who could send the format ('header') command fastest when someone inserted a disk. ;)
I remember we tried this at school and corrupted disks. In the end we had to call out when we wanted to use it to make sure nobody else sent a command at the same time! What with that and the cassette port blowing up if you plugged/unplugged with the power on, we lost so much work, it was awful.
There was another device called a MUPPET that was also used to daisy-chain PETs to a shared disk drive. Not sure if it changed things, but multiple reads weren't a problem. In my school, we would all rush for the computers, turn them on, then try to simultaneously load up some games. Everyone would type load "$" simultaneously to see the directory and then one person would cheer as the winner who got their list first.
Also, we had lots of 80-column SuperPETs. But all the games we had were for 40-column machines. So the first program we loaded was a 40-column emulator that let the games run. Yes, I'm sure we wrote a few BASIC program, but mostly we played "miner" as much as possible.
Yes they had the MUPPET set up, I remember seeing that device with all the ribbon cables running to it. Two of them if I remember right.. with two of those double disk drive units.
Ah, so we were doing it wrong. Probably the twin ieee ports on the disk drive were designed to daisy chain to a printer, not to two PETs !
I paused to read your screen of text.
The very same. TV shows have taught me to read everything on the screen for lil easter eggs.
yup, same here... obviously I have no life
same
*Shakespeare
Fancy Teeth same
I bought a Pet around 1979 for about $1000. I did a lot with it including making a EPROM programmer with software in the Pet's Basic. Also wrote programs in machine language for some hobby projects that also used the 6502. I learned microprocessors with the Pet and as a EE went into machine tool design and also military hardware design. Yes took many many hours of setting in front of the Pet, but if one took away the internet and email what would one be doing with a PC. Gaming is one, but still need the internet. Computers today are plug and play for most all users and they learn little. With the computers of the day of the Pet computers were a learning machine.
When you were about to say the PET had no sound, my earbuds cut out 😆
Is it just me, or are your videos just the best
Except for the CRT noise in this video aaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
That can't be helped. Watching on my android tablet, I can't hear it anyway as the tiny speakers can't produce that high frequency.
8-Bit Guy is GOAT
It's just you
"That Star Trek could've been"
You have declared war, my friend!
Thanks for the vid, David. I just bought a PET from a retired teacher-the last PET in his school’s computer lab that he had salvaged. Coincidentally, this was in Eugene OR, home of the voice synthesis company Covox that you mentioned.
WOW! The floppy disk was crazy. It was just as huge as the machine itself.
I took a BASIC course in 7th grade in 1983, and we used PETs. Good memories!
At 18:43 there's also an Amiga 2000 on the very left of the frame.
WHAT DID YOU SAY