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That reminds me: the early Commodore 8250 floppy drives (for the PET) were even more intelligent. The drive unit was a massive box (about the size of a modern PC) with two drives in it and a SCSI interface to connect to the computer. It was controlled with ASCII commands sent to the drive. The drive unit contained its own 6502 microprocessor, just like the one in the computer. With some work one could write programs that ran in the disk drive. Mostly these involved blinking the drive lights.

There are some interesting Commodore brochures here.

1984 is not that old, the Mac and IBM PC were already out, for heaven's sake! 1984 is long after real classics like the Kim-1, Sinclair ZX80, and Apple II appeared. The real golden age of microcomputing was when you could fit the entire OS, basic interpreter and maybe a game or two into 8 K of RAM. Back then, a budding nerd could easily understand what every single chip and instruction did.

Real men use PEEK, POKE, and GOTO!

I adore my 64,
my Commodore 64!

I sing with it, write with it,
figure my path to flight with it,
my Commodore 64.

I rate with it, create with it,
telecommunicate with it,
my Commodore 64.

I adore my 64,
my Commodore 64!

Well tornadoes only in this version, and their accuarcy was always a little off, but the source code is available.

Chuck Peddle, developer of the "64 columns ought to be enough for anybody" (it was one of the first PCs with an 80-column screen) CBM and the Victor-9000/Sirius-1 - among other things - once owned (maybe still owns, who knows?) a company called NNA, for No Name Available, an expression of his frustration at being unable to find a viable name.

It was in 77. I have heard of a "kim" model which was the first commodore ever, too.
http://www.commodore.ca/products/pet/commodore_pet .htm

Am I the only person who has no idea just what in the hell that is supposed to mean?

The Commodore 64 has been around since 1981, so it's 22 years old. Hence, if it were to walk into a bar, it would be able to order a Jack Daniels.

1-3 belong to commedore.(Amiga)

1. The VIC-20 shipped in 1980 and the Commodore 64 in 1982. The Apple I shipped in 1976 and Apple II in 1977.

2. The Amiga didn't ship until September 1985. The Macintosh shipped in January 1984 (remember the SuperBowl ad?).

3. The Amiga used the same Motorola 680x0 CISC chips the old Macs did. Only the new ones are PowerPC-based. Apple has been shipping PowerMacs since 1994.

Unisys didn't build the first ones. A company called Cemcorp (Canadian Educational Microcomputer Corporation) did, using the resources of a couple of other companies. Cemcorp's parent company was a holding company called Meridian Technologies. At the time, Meridian also held MicroDesign (which did the hardware for the Icon, and eventually became part of Cemcorp) and Jutras Die Casting, among other companies. (Now Meridian does only light metal diecasting.) The first two series of Icons were manufactured in Brockville, Ontario, by a company called Microtel.

The processor was the Intel 80186, as an earlier poster noticed. The reason was simple: it was effectively an 8086, and it was available. But with other Canadian companies like Dynalogic/Bytec-Comterm (makers of the Hyperion) wanting 8086s, and Canada being a single distribution region as far as Intel was concerned, there weren't enough 8086s to go around. But nobody else (except the odd controller manufacturer) wanted 80186s. The QNX C compiler had flags to enable '186- and '286-specific instructions, but Cemcorp never used the '186-specific functionality.

The Ontario Ministry of Education provided the seed money for the project. They mandated mostly Canadian content, so QNX was chosen for the operating system. The Waterloo microlanguages, already proven on the Commodore SuperPET were ported for teaching programming, and QNX's own C compiler was included if students wanted to write their own system stuff. It also had a bug-compatibile version of Logo. The Ministry of Education contracted out the development of a graphical shell called Ambience that had three levels of access control: the administrator, teacher, or student. Teachers had access to students' files; the administrator saw everything. There was shared space for showing off good stuff. It was a great concept. But execution was, well, part of the reason the Icon didn't really succeed, because it didn't work like an Apple, and it didn't work like DOS.

So where'd Unisys come in? Well, in 1983 or so when this was getting started (I did co-op stints with Cemcorp from 1984 to 1987), the guys at Cemcorp didn't have the ability to support or market the product. They contracted with Burroughs for support, quality assurance, and marketing. Burroughs and Sperry became Unisys in 1986, and took a greater interest in promoting the Icon, just as the government subsidy was running out. Unisys had taken over all but the design and integration of the product by the time I did my last work term with Cemcorp. With the dropping of government funding, the demand for DOS compatibility, and competition from Apple, the Icon ceased to be viable.

As likely as that may be, I saw HERE that PET stands for Personal Electronic Transactor. (look on the sidebar under "PET PREview")

Keepi in mind that it was compiled from a scanned article.

As likely as that may be, I saw HERE that PET stands for Personal Electronic Transactor. (look on the sidebar under "PET PREview")

Keepi in mind that it was compiled from a scanned article.