Commodore PET

[3] A single all-in-one case combines a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor, Commodore BASIC in read-only memory, keyboard, monochrome monitor, and, in early models, a cassette deck.Development of the system began in 1976, and it was demonstrated and sold as the first personal computer for the masses at the January 1977 Consumer Electronics Show.TI faced increasing competition from Japanese vertically integrated companies who were using new CMOS-based processors and had a lower total cost of production.As a result, TI was selling complete calculators at lower price points than they sold just the chipset to their former customers, and the industry that had built up around it was frozen out of the market.Along with the 6502 came Chuck Peddle's KIM-1 design (short for "Keyboard Input Monitor") in January of 1976, a small computer kit based on the 6502.[6] The Commodore PET was officially announced in 1976 and Jack Tramiel gave Chuck Peddle six months to have the computer ready for the January 1977 Consumer Electronics Show, with his team including John Feagans, Bill Seiler, two Japanese engineers named Fujiyama and Aoji, and Jack's son Leonard Tramiel,[7] who helped design the PETSCII graphic characters and acted as quality control.Its 6502 processor controlled the screen, keyboard, cassette tape recorders and any peripherals connected to one of the computer's several expansion ports.[9] The machine also included a built-in Datasette for data storage located on the front of the case, which left little room for the keyboard.[11] A working PET 2001 prototype was shown to the public at the Winter CES 1977 in January 1977,[12] and the first hundred units were shipped in October, mostly going to magazines and software developers, while the machine was not generally available to consumers until December.This was delayed by over six months, during which Microsoft lost money and had their cash reserves further depleted by a lawsuit over ownership of Altair BASIC.The PEEK function would not work on memory locations above 49152 so as to prevent the user from viewing the copyrighted code in the system ROMs.Finally, Commodore added a machine-language monitor to the kernel ROM that could be accessed by jumping to any memory location with a BRK instruction.The 4032 was a major success in schools, where its tough all-metal construction and all-in-one design made it better able to stand up to the rigors of classroom use.Used wisely, the port could be used as a simple local area network and allowed printers and disk drives (which were then very expensive) to be shared among all of the machines in the classroom.[citation needed] Unlike later Commodore machines, PETs had no kernel ROM functions for the IEEE-488 port and users had to write their own to use peripherals such as modems.The PET's simple, rugged design and completely enclosed components made it an early favorite in the North American education market.The 3032 and 4032 were produced in two special variants known as the B models with the so-called "business keyboard", which had a conventional layout with mathematical symbols and numbers above the alphabet keys.Entering graphics symbols on PETs with the business keyboard proved something of a challenge since they could not be directly typed out and usually it was necessary to display them indirectly via a CHR$ function.Later machines had modified video circuitry to prevent killer poke damage; a TDA 1170 chip was used in place of the original analog circuit so that if no sync went to the monitor, it would merely be shut off rather than send spurious signals.It also became a popular method of producing explosion effects in games, but because the screen flickered while using the IEEE-488 port, the 16K and 32K models had this feature removed.[19] In 1982, Commodore retired the PET line with the intention of replacing it with the B-series machines; however, they were a marketplace flop and also very expensive to manufacture.Because Commodore still had a strong business software market in Europe, the 80xx series PET was revived during 1984 in a new molded plastic case with a swivel monitor.In addition, the 8296 came bundled with an office suite on disk and the system ROMs included a menu program to launch each of its four applications.Early units contained leftover 8032/96 PCBs in order to get rid of remaining stock; after these were used up, Commodore equipped the machines with a new PCB that replaced the old triple-voltage 4116 DRAMs with more modern types.In the home computer market, the PET line was soon outsold by machines that supported high-resolution color graphics and sound, mainly the Apple II (which shipped in June 1977), Atari 400/800 (1979), and, in particular, Commodore's own bestselling VIC-20 (1980/81).Other than a PC speaker-class beeper, PETs did not have sound hardware (except for the 8000 models), but it was possible to rig a circuit (attributed to Hal Chamberlin[22]: 289 ) up to the 6522 "user" port that could be used to output square wave tones to an external amplifier, and some games supported this feature.[28] Dan Fylstra of Byte magazine received one of the initial PETs in October 1977, S/N 16, and reported on the computer in the March 1978 issue.While it criticized the efficiency of its cassette recorder and the initial lack of adequate documentation, it considered the PET to be the best computer for a classroom.