Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/09/17/commodore-pet-4032-vintage-com.html
…
3 Likes
I played Miner and Oregon Trail on a PET. not sure the model, though.
2 Likes
I vaguely recall trying out a killer POKE on my friend’s PET (with his permission). I don’t think we killed it but did obtain smoke?
5 Likes
Takes a liking! Keeps on ticking!
3 Likes
This is the first ‘real’ computer I ever touched. It was maybe around 1981 or 82. Looking at the font style of the num pad really took me back, wow. We had a computer club in school which wasn’t much of a club. There must have been some kind of ‘central computer’ down in a library back room; we also had a teletype -type machine that was a dumb terminal that would talk to that ‘mainframe’ and and the only output interface was the printer (and a whole lot of paper!). Playing some kind of star wars RPG on that printer was a huge waste of paper!
All us club members played endless rounds of Space Invaders on that green-on-black PET screen. We all had a cassette tape with the game on it. And we were super geek cool.
3 Likes
But why bother? Not like it’s an Apple II or something.
2 Likes
pet brought back to life in home garage
1 Like
“Yeah, I remember those, I had one as a… 
…dang, tough audience!” 
We had a few of those in our computer lab back when I was an undergrad, complete with audio cassette data storage. I played around with it a bit, but I found the HP9825 was a lot more useful, plus it had a lovely flat bed plotter attached to it.
2 Likes
3 Likes
Here’s a deep technical explanation for the Killer Poke:
2 Likes
This is an act of pure love.
3 Likes
The name “Herbert West” comes to mind.
3 Likes
Ugh, flashbacks to my my high school computer lab in 87.
Middle school had a lab full of Apple IIe’s, but then I went to HS and all they had were PETs. I think it was finally junior year when I was allowed to take the programming class. First semester was intro to programming and second semester was “advanced programming.” When second semester came it was only me and one other kid in class, and we both knew more about programming then the teacher. Our project was supposed to be a grade book program for the teacher. We both thought it was BS that he was using us for free labor, so we made a really good looking grade book program. Spent a bunch of time tweaking ASCII art, making all the menus look good and just basically making a really good UI on a PET. But we refused to put in any of the math to actually calculate grades. We had a finished version of the program, it wasn’t that hard to make, but we never gave it to him. At the end of the semester, he could enter in all the student names, enter their grades, and every report would return 0%. Even though he was teaching a programming class, we were pretty sure he didn’t actually know how to fix our work. We still both got A’s in the class.
4 Likes
Ah yeah, I learned BASIC on one of those. My first programming experience. I also found that typing “SYS <random number>” (Commodore BASIC for “begin executing the machine language instructions at memory address <random number>”) would most likely drop you into some kind of cryptic under-world where strange symbols and letter-number things were everywhere (later on the teacher said “oh, that’s the machine language!” and then later on I learned that’s just the Commodore disassembler [aka monitor] which gets invoked whenever the CPU runs across a BRK or equivalent instruction).
I didn’t really absorb much about POKE and PEEK until I got my own Commodore 64 a year or two later. The PET’s display chip was very limited in what it could do, and most of the other memory mapped IO registers were the usual boring IO controller stuff (disk and tape) – stuff that was handled much more efficiently by LOAD and SAVE etc. (machine language in the BASIC and Kernel ROMs).
Had I know about that particular register I might’ve had a field day with it.
1 Like
Because it’s a piece of history that isn’t being manufactured anymore. Humans tend to revere things that they spent a lot of time on. Why restore a classic car? Why restore a painting?
Good on you for doing a stellar restoration, Skotty.
2 Likes
I guess that’s exactly the problem
I don’t feel like “computers” were really worth it until relatively recently, like the advent of podcasts maybe. I guess I regret devoting so much energy to them before that. They were the future, but you can’t live in the future. The Commodore PET seemed like a particularly pointless and expensive toy, even at the time.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
