Excellent! I loved my PET, and pine for it - they're fetching silly money these days or I'd buy one in a heartbeat for the nostalgia. Like Karl Dunkerley, I started with one of these when I was about fifteen thanks to a tech savvy father who couldn't resist buying one of the first Chiclet keyboard models to make it to the UK - indeed he might have got it from the states as he was consulting for an American company around that time. That one was the short-lived 4K RAM model. Later, when it became apparent that these things were an education in their own right, and the future, and also it was hard for him to get a look-in on the 4K one, he bought me my own, an 8K model 3008 with green screen and full sized keyboard, and I spent hours on that teaching myself machine code etc, added a little speaker circuit, upgraded it to 32K RAM and BASIC-4, later got a model 4040 dual floppy drive to go with it. Going through old stuff recently I found some of my PET floppies, but alas no PETs. One technical issue, PET BASIC *did* have a GOSUB - I think Karl was thinking of symbolic labels and named subroutines (which it definitely did not have) but you could GOSUB to a line number and return from whence you came without further complexity. One limitation of the original Commodore BASIC was arrays were limited to 255 elements. Another was PEEK was suppressed in some of the ROM regions to stop you reading the BASIC interpreter machine code. I'm not sure if the original release had the machine language monitor, but mine did - I had no assembler so any assembly I wrote was tested by entering opcodes in hex. As Karl says, people have forgotten about efficiency in general computing circles these days - programs in BASIC occupied far less space than the listing would suggest - each line number was two bytes and the BASIC keywords were all tokenized to single bytes, so you could pack a lot into 8K. (Even opening brackets were part of the tokenized word in the case of functions). I've had many computers over the years, all far more powerful than the PET. In fact, the smallest embedded SOC I've used would be more powerful than the PET. Post-PET I had a C-128, and then an Amiga, I spent ages working with a VAX 11/750 minicomputer, then various microvaxes, I was excited by Linux when it came out and the amazingly powerful Intel machines it ran on, and so on - my career in embedded software design and development was launched by the PET and has brought me close to each successive generation of newer, bigger, faster, cheaper hardware, but there is no other computer in all that time that I've had such a massive fondness for than the Commodore PET. First loves and all that, I guess :-) Again, excellent video, thank you!!
Oh wow! An MZ-80K sitting by Jason's elbow, like it's meant to be there! My first experience of computers when father used to bring it home from work each weekend... Programming games using the built-in graphic characters was entertaining :-) I can still remember the sound of typing on the hard sprung keys in the hollow metal case, and the weight of it, and the bright orange user manual, oh the memories... Suddenly I feel like an old man ;-)
Point of interest : Eastern Electricity used to use Commodore Vic 20's in their main branch in Rayleigh. I know this as when we were kids we found a few in their skip and took them and used them (I already had one anyway).
Fascinating and absorbing, as another commentator has said I too could listen to him for hours! Maybe a follow up that goes more in-depth on the late 90s BBC projects? That sounded fascinating, too!
I remember using a Commodore PET for programming in 1981, but it was typing in games from Computer and Video Games magazine, before I got my BBC model B microcomputer. :-)
My Dad bought a used PET in '83 for $200 (CDN). He brought it home and put it in the spare b'drm in the basement. I was the user of it most of the time. This was before the widespread knowledge of the Internet. The only information source I had were from Compute! magazines and books about Commodore (and other home computers). I so much would have prefered my Dad to have bought a used PC or XT instead. Or a RS CoCo. I desperately wanted to connect the PET to local BBSes. I didn't know about how to connect it because the PET didn't have a regular RS-232 connector on it, instead it had an RS-422 which was not that common. One day my Dad brought up the PET to the kitchen, plugged it into the stove outlet and the PET went POOF. Didn't have a home computer until Mar. '85 when he bought a brand-new Commodore 64 for $500 and a used 1200 bps modem.
Yeah my first computer was a TRS-80 - and I'd had a modem so could connect to lots of stuff. Didn't get a computer in high school until my senior year. In fact my firsts semester in college we used VT-100's connected to a PDP-11/70. Then came the PL/I course - punch cards. Really?
That was thoroughly enjoyable! Thank you for the video. Does anyone know the make/model of the other computer/terminal in this video, the one sat beside the presenter? Cheers.
Well spotted! I think you're bang on about it being an MZ-80K. I've never seen one and I've ever seen any computer with such a small spacebar. I was going to ask how you could read what's on the screen when I realized I could watch this video in 1080p. It was totally illegible at 720p. Thanks for your help!
Odd false memory: I thought the Pet tape deck was on the right, what am I thinking of then? (We got to look at a Pet at primary school when they first came out: it stayed with us for several weeks, we thought it was magic, but nobody knew how to operate it.)
Well for any programming project it's essential that the programmers know in depth what the program should do and how it will be used. That's one of the reasons outsourcing doesn't work on software.
6:50 Isn't Karl exaggerating a bit? "By then I'd been writing 1000 line programs, 2000 line programs"... He said their PET had 8 kB of memory. How do you fit 2000 lines of code in 7 kB? (7167 bytes available in BASIC) Also, as mentioned in other comments, 19:45 is wrong. It did have a GOSUB command. He may be fun to listen to, but this interview needs some serious fact checking. He seems like the kind of guy to make his story "a bt more interesting" every time he tells it.
Re. Teaching - my son is 13 and they are getting them coding vb with visual studio (although vs2010) - so step in the right direction. Sadly they dont seem to push the bright students.
I cannot imagine a more appropriate computer to run a PETrol station!
Brilliant stuff! I could listen to him all day.. Thanks..
Excellent! I loved my PET, and pine for it - they're fetching silly money these days or I'd buy one in a heartbeat for the nostalgia. Like Karl Dunkerley, I started with one of these when I was about fifteen thanks to a tech savvy father who couldn't resist buying one of the first Chiclet keyboard models to make it to the UK - indeed he might have got it from the states as he was consulting for an American company around that time. That one was the short-lived 4K RAM model. Later, when it became apparent that these things were an education in their own right, and the future, and also it was hard for him to get a look-in on the 4K one, he bought me my own, an 8K model 3008 with green screen and full sized keyboard, and I spent hours on that teaching myself machine code etc, added a little speaker circuit, upgraded it to 32K RAM and BASIC-4, later got a model 4040 dual floppy drive to go with it. Going through old stuff recently I found some of my PET floppies, but alas no PETs.
One technical issue, PET BASIC *did* have a GOSUB - I think Karl was thinking of symbolic labels and named subroutines (which it definitely did not have) but you could GOSUB to a line number and return from whence you came without further complexity. One limitation of the original Commodore BASIC was arrays were limited to 255 elements. Another was PEEK was suppressed in some of the ROM regions to stop you reading the BASIC interpreter machine code. I'm not sure if the original release had the machine language monitor, but mine did - I had no assembler so any assembly I wrote was tested by entering opcodes in hex. As Karl says, people have forgotten about efficiency in general computing circles these days - programs in BASIC occupied far less space than the listing would suggest - each line number was two bytes and the BASIC keywords were all tokenized to single bytes, so you could pack a lot into 8K. (Even opening brackets were part of the tokenized word in the case of functions).
I've had many computers over the years, all far more powerful than the PET. In fact, the smallest embedded SOC I've used would be more powerful than the PET. Post-PET I had a C-128, and then an Amiga, I spent ages working with a VAX 11/750 minicomputer, then various microvaxes, I was excited by Linux when it came out and the amazingly powerful Intel machines it ran on, and so on - my career in embedded software design and development was launched by the PET and has brought me close to each successive generation of newer, bigger, faster, cheaper hardware, but there is no other computer in all that time that I've had such a massive fondness for than the Commodore PET. First loves and all that, I guess :-)
Again, excellent video, thank you!!
Oh wow! An MZ-80K sitting by Jason's elbow, like it's meant to be there! My first experience of computers when father used to bring it home from work each weekend... Programming games using the built-in graphic characters was entertaining :-) I can still remember the sound of typing on the hard sprung keys in the hollow metal case, and the weight of it, and the bright orange user manual, oh the memories... Suddenly I feel like an old man ;-)
Superb - really fascinating listening to Karl.
Point of interest : Eastern Electricity used to use Commodore Vic 20's in their main branch in Rayleigh. I know this as when we were kids we found a few in their skip and took them and used them (I already had one anyway).
Fascinating! Thank you for sharing.
My first computer was the Sharp MZ80K which is next to the interviewer. The MZ80K was similar to PET but was based on the Z80 CPU.
Wonderful, interview and really interesting. Thanks!
Fascinating and absorbing, as another commentator has said I too could listen to him for hours! Maybe a follow up that goes more in-depth on the late 90s BBC projects? That sounded fascinating, too!
*Really* enjoyable interview. Dude has such a wide background of experience.
I remember using a Commodore PET for programming in 1981, but it was typing in games from Computer and Video Games magazine, before I got my BBC model B microcomputer. :-)
thanks for that vid, time flew watching it!
My Dad bought a used PET in '83 for $200 (CDN). He brought it home and put it in the spare b'drm in the basement. I was the user of it most of the time. This was before the widespread knowledge of the Internet. The only information source I had were from Compute! magazines and books about Commodore (and other home computers).
I so much would have prefered my Dad to have bought a used PC or XT instead. Or a RS CoCo.
I desperately wanted to connect the PET to local BBSes. I didn't know about how to connect it because the PET didn't have a regular RS-232 connector on it, instead it had an RS-422 which was not that common.
One day my Dad brought up the PET to the kitchen, plugged it into the stove outlet and the PET went POOF.
Didn't have a home computer until Mar. '85 when he bought a brand-new Commodore 64 for $500 and a used 1200 bps modem.
My 1980 PET had GOSUB, so they must have added it a couple years after this.
They called it the "MSX Invasion", but it never really happened. A wonderful story about an iconic computer.
great stuff :-) thanks for posting!
A quick review of the Bank of England RPI calculator shows that £695 in 1978 is about £4,000 at current prices...
Woah. Holy crap..
Thanks for doing that calc, I was wondering what the current value would have been!
Yeah my first computer was a TRS-80 - and I'd had a modem so could connect to lots of stuff. Didn't get a computer in high school until my senior year. In fact my firsts semester in college we used VT-100's connected to a PDP-11/70. Then came the PL/I course - punch cards. Really?
That was thoroughly enjoyable! Thank you for the video.
Does anyone know the make/model of the other computer/terminal in this video, the one sat beside the presenter? Cheers.
Well spotted! I think you're bang on about it being an MZ-80K. I've never seen one and I've ever seen any computer with such a small spacebar.
I was going to ask how you could read what's on the screen when I realized I could watch this video in 1080p. It was totally illegible at 720p.
Thanks for your help!
Yes, undoubtedly a Sharp MZ-80K.
Odd false memory: I thought the Pet tape deck was on the right, what am I thinking of then? (We got to look at a Pet at primary school when they first came out: it stayed with us for several weeks, we thought it was magic, but nobody knew how to operate it.)
Great use of a computer to aid a business.
Well for any programming project it's essential that the programmers know in depth what the program should do and how it will be used. That's one of the reasons outsourcing doesn't work on software.
It came with a manual. Quite a good one.
What version of PET BASIC did not have GOSUB (mentioned at 19:45) ? I used the 4032 model at school and it did have it.
Yea I went looking for the commodore basic with no go sub and found 2.0 even had it.
Is this a trick question? ;)
Answer: ALL versions of Commodore Basic had the GOSUB ... RETURN program flow commands.
I paid $3000 to get a 5 mb hard drive for my PET. I now have 5 mb files
6:50 Isn't Karl exaggerating a bit? "By then I'd been writing 1000 line programs, 2000 line programs"... He said their PET had 8 kB of memory. How do you fit 2000 lines of code in 7 kB? (7167 bytes available in BASIC)
Also, as mentioned in other comments, 19:45 is wrong. It did have a GOSUB command.
He may be fun to listen to, but this interview needs some serious fact checking. He seems like the kind of guy to make his story "a bt more interesting" every time he tells it.
Does anybody know what’s the computer behind the interviewer?
Hi, It's a Sharp MZ-80K
See : www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/2867/Sharp-MZ-80K/
Thanks a lot.
Bought an MZ-80K back in 1980/81 when I was in college. There’s still one in the loft (and an 8032 PET and various others).
Re. Teaching - my son is 13 and they are getting them coding vb with visual studio (although vs2010) - so step in the right direction. Sadly they dont seem to push the bright students.
TRS80 was primarily for the business
You needed an Amiga with autoconfig :)