More video revision madness. My Commodore PET, now in high definition. 

Been meaning to get a PETDisk for quite some time now for my 8032. Got a PETVet not too long ago and it's great!

Fantastic video again, great to see an updated version for this amazing machine.

In this video, the middle edge card connector on the rear of the PET is referred to as the "printer port". It is in fact the "User Port". Although it 'can' support a parallel printer connected there, the PET's BASIC routed "Print" output via the IEEE-488 port, and all Commodore printers for the PET plugged in the IEEE port. As far as I can recall, there were aftermarket adapters to convert the IEEE port to what used to be called a "Centronics" port, which was a standard type of parallel printer port that pretty much all printers (other than the Commodore ones) used. The user would have to write special machine language code to use the "User Port" for output to a printer.

I also noted that Terry (Tezza) claimed that his particular PET does not have sound. Most of the PETs did not have sound, and those that did simply had a piezo buzzer that could make crappy sound. There was a 'standard' way of getting 'good' sound on the PET, which involved wiring up an audio cable to two pins on the User Port ('ground/shield' to one pin and 'audio signal' to another pin, using an edge card connector). The audio cable was then plugged into the user's stereo, or a small powered speaker, or a PA system, guitar amp, etc. The same VIA chip in the PET which controlled the User Port had an internal function that would produce a square wave signal at audio frequencies, controllable by simple POKE commands. As I recall, pretty much every PET program that 'had sound' was in fact written to use that 'standard' audio setup, rather then some integral sound device. So if you hook up the User Port to a powered speaker, then your PET will have sound for those games and such.

Some music programs used another method of getting PET sound. This also involved the User Port, and the user would wire up a series of resistors in a 'resistor ladder' configuration to the eight data pins of the User Port, and the program could 'output' various voltages via the resistor ladder by selectively turning the eight data pins on or off in the correct patterns. This was essentially a simple digital-to-analog converter (DAC), and the audio cable would be connected between the resistor ladder and the powered speaker. The program could rapidly change the data pattern to produce any desired audio waveform, not just the square wave audio provided by the simpler method. But unlike the simpler method, where the VIA chip did all the work, the more complex method required that the program do all the work, and BASIC was not nearly fast enough, so the sound generating program needed to be in machine language.

Another couple of comments on this video and the PET in general:

Back in the day, I had one of the earliest PETs, so early that it was incompatible with subsequent PETs. A Commodore technician visited the "Mr. Calculator" store (a chain store that sold primarily Commodore calculators, and it was in that store that I ordered my PET and picked it up months later when Commodore got around to catching up with all the pre-orders), and he made a few mods to the circuit board, and advised me that I would need to replace the ROMs as well in order to be compatible with future software applications. As I recall it took the better part of a year before Commodore filled my pre-order for the so-called "upgrade ROMs", which was the middle version of BASIC.

My PET had the integral datasette and 'chiclet' keyboard. I had soon obtained an after market full sized keyboard which sat on the desk in front of the PET and connected with a long ribbon cable. It was actually much nicer than the full-sized keyboards that Commodore added to the PETs later on. I also had an after-market IEEE-488 adapter to 'Centronics/parallel' port, and used a daisy-wheel printer along with one of the better word processors available for the PET. I also had a Commodore dot-matrix printer that I used for program listings and anything with graphics. All printers and disk drives connected daisy-chain style to the IEEE-488 port, and the PET could support many devices at a time that were connected this way, and if I had a disk drive it would have been yet another device on that port. The problem was that once you went from the PET to the first IEEE-488 device, all subsequent cables in the daisy-chain were regular IEEE-488 cables, and they were quite expensive.

But anyway, I think the BASIC on the PET was actually quite good. Full-featured for the time, and superior to the versions of BASIC found on the Apple II and TRS-80, and essentially bug-free. Microsoft had done a good job on it.

The large floppy disk drives for the PET cost more than the PET itself. My computer club bought the dual-drive model, and we used it to keep our club's software library and to make copies of software during our meetings. But individual users mostly just owned the 'datasettes, which while slow were at least quite reliable.

I sold my original PET in 1986, and the same day that the Space Shuttle blew up. I was transitioning to the early IBM personal computers and figured that I would never have interest or use for the Commodore. However, I did have a C-64 with a disk drive, and kept that for a while longer.

I now own a PET model 2001-32B (via eBay), which is the business version of the 2001-32N pictured in this video. The only differences are that the keyboard on mine does not have the 'PETSCII' graphics characters printed on the fronts of the keys, and the computers boots into the alternate character set, having upper and lower case text but no graphics; I need to do a POKE command to switch to the upper case/graphics character set that 'normal' PETs booted into (they had to do the POKE to access the upper/lower case character set). I have both a datasette and the 'bitfixer/com PETdisk', which as noted in this video works very well.

Thanks for another great in depth video.I was quite young when these were around so it's nice to really see someone show what they're capable of.

Here is something crazy you can do on a PET:

poke 59587,42

The #42 is pretty safe, and will cause the text to fold in crazy ways.
Other values can change the frequency of the refresh and affect the flyback transformer.

When I was young I would poke this (and a few other, nearby) #'s with values that would create a nauseating high pitch noise that drove everyone near the PET's mad.

The side benefit was that after a few hours of this some of the computers would start to pop and break -- eventually getting us upgraded computers (sadly, the crappy Tandy 1000's, but still better than PET's).

Certainly looks like a computer out of a sci-fi movie from those days. That's for sure... ;)

I actually thought the basic was the best and most enjoyable to use of these old 8 bits. Don't believe me, try Apple, Atari, TI, or Sinclair Basic. (I think the TRS Coco had some powerful commands in it but I never used it)

However, C= BASIC was sorely lacking in a few basic disk operating system commands. A nondestructive "DIR", "RUN", and "DEL" command would of ameliorated that, plus an autorun on powerup of a "BOOT" program off the first disk drive like the Apple ][ had. They had some fast boot cartridges that added a slew of DOS commands but I never had one. Wish I had.

Thanks for very nice video of Super Machine CBM-3032.
I had made lots of Fortran programs on IBM compatible machine on these days.
CBM-3032 was my first "personal computer" that I programed my Basic language programs when I was a student/kid.
It was really great machine made in USA.

Luxury !! You have the "real" keyboard. My baby has that chicklet keyboard, making it lots of fun programming with peeks and pokes.

Wow, yet another fine item from your awesome computer collection. Thank you for sharing and for your wonderful insight!

Even though the ][  was the first computer I used,  and even though we went on to be have a TRS in the family,  the PET is still the machine that says 70s computer to me.  Once saw a PET sprayed black and it was surprisingly handsome, or was that my Sinclair fetish peeping out?   

why the name 3032? Is that for 30 column 32k?

Can Commodore "2001" series accept linux?

Sir, shure you have Sound in this maschine! There ist one Pin of the User-Port you can wire with a capacitor and resistor to an external Amplifier, e.g. to the Line-In of the Amp.
This works too with the older PET2001... I dont know the exakt Pin, but you can turn Sound on and search for it with an Oscilloscope...

very nice video ! where can I gate the basic games images ? thanks

Still have my 3032 in the basement. Unfortunately, the screen does not turn on any more. A couple of years ago when i tested it, the screen was already barely working. Looked like the CRT is in trouble. Never mind. I liked them at the time. Today I am quite happy with modern machines. They are so much better.

Great video

love the way..you dressed your pet up!!!

I sell one

This AIO design was 40 years ahead of its time.

I was 16yrs old in 1979 when my high school bought two of these with the chicklet keyboards. I learned basic, wrote a game called Star Chase, but as in your demo it was too slow. So I then learned to write 6502 code. After adding graphics update routines in 6502 my game was as snappy as any arcade game machine!

Wait to be jealous, but i have 4 of these machines! The blue badge original 1977, a black badge 1978 with chiclet kwyboards...then i have a 4032 and a 4016. I managed to track down a disk drive 8050 but it is truly the most run down drive i have ever seen! So...for now it is tapes gallore for me.

Lucky man, I would love one of these, however they are extremly rare

watching these videos is really a bad influence. its giving me the urge to buy a lot of these machines that have almost no practical use whatsoever. i already have a list of about 14 of them that i want.

wen i was in college . i took some basic skills classes to bump up my math. they had a pet w external cassette tape drive and we had to goto the book store to buy blank cassettes . painful to load and painful to store generated answers . i played with some basic programing and one of the aides exxclaimed ," i didnt know u could do that ".meaning program the machine . i wrote this . 10 cls . 20 print "hello" 30 end . typed run :) the pet had a lot proprietary tapes that were available to us . we needed the tapes to store answers . etx

I used to manufacture add-ons for these back in the 80's. Graphics card, eeprom programmer, print buffer,  memory cards, alternative bios.  You had to be prepared to use a soldering iron to upgrade these, no plug and play.

They were great machines for the time. the first one I purchased cost £450 which was the price of a decent second hand car.

Which model of Commodore PET/CBM allowed connection to a modem for external communications?

Interesting ... i got my PET a couple of days ago, and now im trying to figure out what i need to purchase to make it usable again :P

I know from reading about Atari trying to come up with a Basic for their computer that they originally bought the source code for Microsoft Basic and that what other computer companies did. So maybe that's what Commodore did.

Never had one, but wanted one, also wanted a superbrain because of that all in one design, very futuristic looking for the day.

It's called the PET 2001 because by the fantastic year twenty hundred and one there is expected to be one of these machines in every home in America!

cardige

Chuck Peddle looks so old on the picture, but thankfully he is still alive. He should have worn 80s nerd glasses than these :)

Around 1990 my mom brought home a CBM 3032 with a tape and disk drive. It also had several programs like dBase (I think) and Visicalc. It had been donated to the local Salvation Army thrift store and they didn't want it. I was able to get one floppy drive working for about a week but then it started making grinding noises and that was that. I held on to it until about 2000 before it got trashed in a spring cleaning. How a CBM 3032 ended up in Philadelphia I'll never know.

Adorable retro design! But wait a minute, if the mouse was widge-shaped and the Apple Lisa was the Lisa 2 Tin, why is this not the Commodore Pit? :-)

In high school we had at least one, two or more Commodore PET Computers and we had Commodore 64 Computers mostly. The Commodore PET Computer really looks great til our modern day As a kid I owned Commodore 64 I enjoyed it very much

I Love the shape of the monitor! I have to admit though, I'm sure the original keyboard wasn't pleasant to use and the build in tape drive looks strange but WOW I'd love to have one. The PET is an obscure machine in the United States and I'm thinking you may be the only person in your entire country to have one.

Could use a good dusting.

Hi Terry. still waiting for your new vídeos!!! cheers:)

Funny that all your e sound like i. Pet US sounds like Pit Yuis.

Cool old PC

The pet computer may be basic nowaday's but it's amezing the things you can do with it like things it was never intended for,such as creating pseudo graphics games or drawings using ascill characters, and with that sd card adaptor, you can push the system to it's limit, i really like how peoples became so creative with ascill characters.
Also,you can overclock the pet computer from 1 mhz to 10 mhz to run your games smoothly on it.

Looks like she's in good condition. First time I ever encountered one was in 1st grade. Was kind of intimidated by microcomputers back then. :-)

Wow! Great video! Your PET looks brand new!

Thanks Terry for posting - I had a job on one of these in the late 70s....data entry! Memories, memories. Disk drive was pretty noisy if I recall right.

This was the first computer I ever used.  My high school had 2 Commodore PETS (I think they got them in 1979, a year before I started there).  It was such a good looking machine...even now it looks like a serious computer...it's a shock to see how empty it was when you 'lift the hood'!  At school we soon moved on to the Apple ][, Vic 20, Commodore 64 and BBC Micro, but the PET was the start of it all.

We borrowed one of these from a university back in the late 1980s. I was only young at the time, but I did write some simple BASIC programs on it. It was the same one shown in this video, but we didn't have a datasette unit so couldn't load or save anything.

The PET was the first computer I programed on. Sadly I didn't go into programming (even though I really wanted to (I had no support system to follow up on the dream)) but I did some simple programs that I had to troubleshoot and get to work. The PET was at the library so I had a limited amount of time on it. 

Do you know what that that edge connector is next to the large capacitor ( 6:02 ) ?
I suspect that it might be a second cassette interface to allow the possibility of adding an internal cassette on a different model.

A PET souped up with a MicroSD card... amazing!

I remember seeing an illustration of a PET in a kids computer book I borrowed from the library in the 80s (when I too was a kid). I remember thinking how it looked the most like a "computer" of anything I'd seen in real life (such as the C64, TI994/A etc). Due to this (and probably because I'd never seen one in the flesh) the PET held a great amount of mystique for me. It certainly screamed "serious computing found here"!

Looking at the original PET 2001 on the net, I have to wonder why Commodore used those chicklet keys? According to Chuck Peddle in the "On the Edge" book, it was because they couldn't fit a real fullsize keyboard AND the data cassette recorder. But surely they could have done away with the numeric keypad?

Also Tezza, you're the first person to point out that the top row of the keyboard had no numerals. How bizarre! I guess they felt the numpad did that job.

this takes me back to grade school. my first affair with a micro!!!
hahahaa!!! thanks for sharing!!!

I have one of those.  Which makes me part of the club.  Not my oldest computer though.  My oldest is two TRS-80 Model 1 circa 1977.  Even older than the Kaypro's, Heathkits, CBMs, and other 8 bits I have.   Lol, I even have a black Bell & Howell Apple 2, so that means I own all three of the 1977 trinity...

Love it!  Unfortunately I don't have space for one.  Thanks for the updated video.

Excellent. Many thanks for the video. I never owned one of these but along with the TRS80 I remember these as "wish I could afford" rigs.
Cheers
Jim

Excellent video, Terry!  I read a book on the history of Commodore, and the book says that Commodore's marketing was much better in Europe.

I love that car bonnet method for opening the PET up!!

Hi Terry
Thank you for all of your good videos througout the year.

And happy christmas from Denmark :-)