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PET Computer Article, Circa 1978
Anonymous Coward writes "Every month, Playboy features excerpts from current and historic issues. This month's historic issue is from 1978 and features a very brief write-up of the new Commodore PET computer."
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I've got a mirror of this up for anyone behind a firewall... http://www.dump.net/~moonwick/mirror/pet/ - Moonwick
http://www.enteract.com/~kashani/petbook.jpg
- Why is the ninja... so deadly?
Are you sure about this? The Commodore seems like a pretty poor environment for a virus to spread (outside of a testbed environment); it has no operating system proper, no relocatable executables, no hijackable system services (everything's ROM) and very primitive memory management. And in a "10 SYS 2061"-type program, there's nowhere a virus could insert itself.
Unless you refer to the trick by which the cartridge signature and start vector were written into the RAM under where the cartridge ROM would go (it only had 64K address space, so things had to double up, or even triple up), so that on reset the machine would think it had a cartridge and jump to the address specified. A lot of games did this.
...on to some 16 color pirate game.
Tai Pan by any chance? For a game with almost NO moving pictures, it was a blast!
**>>BELCH
Remember the Temple of Apshai? I miss that game... is it available anywhere? I remember waiting for what seemed like HOURS for that game to load up on the tape drive... and waiting an eternity for the asci characters to move the character through the dungeon... and making maps that never quite connected correctly... and getting killed by slimes...
*sigh*
That was the first great RPG game... waaay before Lord British.
Oh, and let's not forget those star trek sim games! What realism! And the Wumpus hunt!
The Commodore Pet was my first exposure to computers, too. I still think that computers with free-standing keyboards and monitors look funny...
I felt cheated when the C64 came out, b/c the whole thing was in the keyboard! I mean, where's the boxy metal and glass! The Pet felt like the control panel of a spaceship, or something! (Hey, I was eight, gimme a break).
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
In high school (sometime around '92) my friends and I were running a DJ business. We actually did pretty good despite the fact that everything we used to DJ was almost all self built.
Anyway, we had someone gotten our hands on a PET and its printer. Yeah, the technology was old even then, but we found a way to make it useful. A few hours of coding some horrible looking basic and we had our "DJ request computer." Instead of bugging us, people would walk up to the pet, see our attractive logo (much like you say Playboy's in the article,) answer a few questions and their request was answered. On days when the printer was actually working, it would then print out behind the DJ booth. On days when it wasn't, the requests would be stored in a big ass array that we would go and check with our backdoor password into the program. It was pretty cool and very geeky, but it impressed people.
Maybe on another occation I'll get to post about how we used discarded TRS-80s and a homemade board to control and create a lightshow.
Portable had a different meaning back then. IBM called their 5100 a "portable" computer as well, causing some to (mistakenly!) consider it the first portable computer. (It's not, that's most likely the STM Systems Baby! 1).
Today, people think of a "portable" computer as one that you would normally take with you during the everyday course of business, to be used in many different locations. These can range in size from wearables to Handspring Visors, to notebooks, to lunchboxes, all the way up to the sewing-machine-sized osborne 1 and similar.
But back then, "portable" would have meant a computer that didn't need to be in a specially-built, air-conditioned, extra-clean room, and you didn't need to hire a team of specialists from the manufacturer just to move it to another part of the office. You could unplug it, put it on a cart, wheel it over to where ever you wanted it, and plug it back in. It was relatively portable.
These were not something you would move around all the time; they were something you could move when you had to.
Later, a new level of functionality began to emerge -- computers designed to be taken with you and used in multiple locations, perhaps even during the same day. "Portable" computing took on a new meaning, fostered by such innovative or popular computers as the Osborne 1, GRiD Compass, Sharp PC-5000, Panasonic HHC, Epson HX-20, TRS-80 Model 100, and of course the Compaq Portable.
You can see more venerable portable computers in my collection, or elsewhere on the web. You can see many of them in person at the next Vintage Computer Festival.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
A few years back, I was working with a company that had a 15-year-old software package and, at the same time, was developing a new, PC-based package. I sat there with the old guys, updating the existing package, and listened to the young micro-weenies trying to figure out solutions to the same problems others had solved 20 or even 30 years prior.
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
As to your terminal and 2400bps modem -- I doubt you type or read more than 240 characters per second, so why not use it as a dial-up terminal to a unix box? No X-windows, of course, but then that's for micro-weenies anyway. 8^)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I don't think Commodore marketed the Pet as a portable either.
But, it's a matter of viewpoint. Looking back from today, where we have visors and psions and sony vaios and so on, a young person of today could look at an Osborne and say, yeah, I could see where that might be considered portable back in the dinosaur age.
But someone from the 60's or even 70's computer industry, looking forward to the Commodore Pet (or the IBM 5100 or the TRS-80 Model III) would see a small, all-in-one, computer that they could pick up and move themselves to another cubicle without having to call a bunch of specialists and schedule it 3 months in advance (hoping the air-conditioning guys actually show up before then.)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
There is a lot of work going on to preserve the history of the computer industry, but there is still a lot that needs to be done. Much of our past is disappearing before our eyes as we continue to move forward.
(You can see part of my collection on-line as well.)
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
There's a picture in Hal Layer's collection, or check out Deep Space Tech if you want to buy one.
And of course, we have to have the obligatory Linux on NeXT link.
Stupid people will be persecuted to the fullest extent allowed by law.
I still have a KIM-1 from 1977. Built by Commodore, it had a 1Mhz 6502, 1k ram, 6 digit 7 segment display and a hex keypad. What was amazing was that there was a chess program called MicroChess written by Peter Jennings (not that one) that actually played an okay game (considering the hardware). He used all available ram AND the extra 32 bytes available in some of the I/O chips.
Ah, the good ol' days of hand assembly code.
mike
I am reading Playboy only because of its IT technology coverage.
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You may like my a cappella music
I think this is a good idea. Do the "What is your estimate of the average Slashdot reader's age?" poll first, and then the "What is your age?" poll a week later.
This actually sounds fun!
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Hmmmm....1978...
:)
Back the, "portable" would have meant a computer that didn't need to be in a specifically-built, air-conditioned, extra-clean room, and you didn't need to hire a team of specialists from the manufacturer just to move it...
I don't recall Apple as having pawned their Apple ][ off as being "portable." (Apple ][ was introduced in 1977) Neither was the Altair (1975).
Although I suppose I can understand what you mean...
My journal has hot
Did anyone notice that the article said that it was PORTABLE?! HAH! Has anyone seen the PET 2001? Its portable if your definition of portable is neither bolted to the desk or chained to alarm system!
LMAO....
My journal has hot
anonimizer and rewebber.de don't need to be the proxy, they do url rewriting.
Yeah, that is weird, I dug out my Altair a while back and was fiddling with it and tried to remember the bootstrap code, I couldnt remember the bytes, but my fingers remembered the sequence of switch flips needed to boot the machine off tape, it was about 20 bytes, flip, flip, flip, deposit, flip, flip, deposit next, ....
I must have done that hundreds of times, it's now burned into my wetware... Still retains the data after 25 years.
Starman97@Gmail.com (bring it on spammers)
Have fun.
"If one is really a superior person, the fact is likely to leak out without too much assistance" -- John Andrew Holmes
... a beowulf cluster of these would be able to crack CSS in 6 months :)
If you could get them on a network, of course...
Ahh, the good old days of sneekernet.
I remmeber my high school had whole labs of these, and during the era of the C64 a friend of mine brought me over to his house, showed me a PET and asked me "Is this thing any good?", my reply "dude, its not even color!", this must have been atleast 15 years ago....
--- iCEBaLM
Hey! That was my first program, too (although I ran it on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum)! You do realise I have a patent on the technology involved ("A New Method For Producing An Unlimited Number Of Consecutive Integers Using A Programmable Electronic Calculation Device")? Ok you owe me 100000$..
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
This is an important part of the history of our culture, and a very fleeting one. Those early machines were in use for only half-a-dozen years between the emergence of the first micro-processors in the mid seventies and the arrival of IBM's horrible Intel based kludge in 1982; within that time there was incredibly rapid evolution, and many interesting designs were tried. The 8K PET deserves an honourable mention in this process because it was one of the first machines to come all in one box, ready to buy off the shelf; most of it's contemporary competition was kits, often without provision for a keyboard or a video display.
It is also the direct and very obvious ancestor of the Commodore 64K and the VIC20, both of which were common home/games machines in the early eighties.
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
some nerds actually DO read playboy for the articles.
Try one of these. The first one works for me.
http://fr0.idzap.com/
http://www.proxymate.com/
http://www.anonymizer.com/3.0/index.shtml
Wow - memories!
:)
:) then on to an Apple LISA (anyone remember *them*? :) and an IBM-PC.
:) Shit - my toaster has more RAM than a VIC-20 :)
High school in New Zealand around 1980 - a whole 13 years old and I meet my first computer in maths class. We had a lab which featured a couple of PET's hooked up to a shared disk drive (or something like this). I had been typing for a few years on an old type-writer so I got selected to enter the commands (LOAD xxx,8 - or something
When I asked what the commands meant, I heard the most important words of my life for the first time. The words that would shape my future:
"Read the F Manual"
:)
After this, we wound up in Australia where I picked up a VIC-20, then on to an Apple II clone (with Z80 chip - hello CP/M
All down hill from there, I'm afraid...
Damn but I love those memories. Back when 5k of RAM in a VIC-20 was cool (before you turned it on - 1.5k after start-up thanks to BASIC & the screen display
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
I still have the dot-matrix printer that came with, a weird electrostatic thing: when you turn off the lights, you can see the sparks fly as the imager fries the special silver-gray wax-paper. We even did the funky parallel-port modification that adds an RCA plug.
Like my Amigas, it's nothing but preventative maintenance, now. I use a pencil eraser and isopropyl alcohol to keep the chiclet keyboard contacts fresh. I've still only been through a fraction of the hundreds of programs my uncle handed over to me a year ago.
Man, I'd love to get NetBSD on this thing...
Then the next year we got some machines with 16K of RAM and found ourselves saying things like, "You'll NEVER need more than 16K of RAM." (Where have I heard something like that before?).
And then later in that year I went to a computer programming contest (cough!) at a local high school and I was treated to a 32K PET with a REAL keyboard and a larger screen. We came in 2nd to some guys with an Apple ][.
Somewhere in a box in my cellar I still have some cassette tapes with some of my early programs on them... I also have an old Byte magazine with Bill Shatner doing an add for the PET. I'll have to scan it and put in on my web site.
Ah the memories! :-)
Ignore Alien Orders
Yeah, but can you overclock it to 2 MHz? How bout a 1200 baud modem? It had, what, a whopping 4K memory? Woohoo! Screw my AMD K6/2-350, I gotta get me one of THESE!!!
Let's look at what it can do:
* Play MP3s at a stunning 1Hz sample rate. *click* *click* *click*
* Play full motion streaming video, if that streaming video is ASCII characters.
* Full fledged Internet Access. Using Telnet. Dialed in. In a terminal window.
* one of the most secure platforms in existence. About as secure as a doorstop - and about as useful.
On the bright side, I doubt MS could have ever written anything small enough to work on it (yeah yeah yeah don't remind me of the Altair...)
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
dum da dum, da dum dum da dummmmm. da dummmmmmm...
PET. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the computer Commodore. Its 5 year mission. To seek out new geeks, and new nerds. To boldly go where no hunk of silicon has gone before.
"Captain's log, stardate 1978.0. We... have.... slappedtogetherabunchofchips. We... come... inpeace. If... only... Jacktramielwouldleaveusalone."SPOCK: "Captain, I can't understand a word you're saying."
"Never..... mind, Spock. You're outofyourvulcanmind. Stick ... that... cassette... intothelittleslotoverthere. See... how... wellitworks? It... has.... a... whopping.... *long pause* 4kofmemory, and... is... a... dreamtouse."
MCCOY: "Damnit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a pencilneck!"
*grin* *screws a random woman* *episode over*
If you can't figure out how to mail me, don't.
For linux tips: http://www.linuxtipsblog.com
I dont have the resources to mirror this, but here's the text:
Copyright (C) Playboy!!
If you think man's best friend is his pet dog, then you haven't seen the portable Model 2001 PET home computer that Commodore, an international electronics company, has just introduced at the mind-boggling price of only $595. The PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) features a TV screen, a keyboard that's as simple to use as a typewriter, a self-contained cassette recorder that is the source for programs and for storing data and a memory system. What's it do? Just about everything from maintaining personal records to answering the telephone.
Pictured here is just a sampling of PET's capabilities, beginning with a doodle of Starship Enterprise that's been drawn on the screen via one's punching keyboard keys that activate various graphic symbols, such as squares, line segments, etc.
If you don't recognize this electronic sketch, Charley, you've got no business buying a computer.
PET will also maintain your personal checkbook records on a program that logs a cumulative record of your deposits and expenses. Furthermore, it can also be programmed to give monthly balances and records of how the money was spent.
Not ANY computer--it doesn't list MY first machine. A truly excellent beast, was the Victor 4000. In many ways, quite ahead of it's time--and sadly, sunk without a trace. I've never even met someone who's HEARD of it. It even pioneered (it was the first, and as far as I know, last, to use it) an interesting technique by which the disk drive heads changed speed based on their position. Made it's disks completly incompatible with every other system known to man, but it packed a few more K on to a 5'1/4" disk...
Maybe I'm just a female who could care less about playboy . . . but this article seems rather incongruous when compared to the rest of the informative articles here at slashdot. -Qirien
-- Qirien, Academy of Defenestration
-- Qirien, Academy of Defenestration
"Who do you want to defenestrate today?"
I believe they used static RAM rather than dynamic RAM. Static RAM doesn't need to be refreshed, just supplied with electricity. It's more expensive than dynamic RAM, which is why it went out of fashion for main storage once RAM capacities went up. The VIC-20 used static RAM (all 5K of it, in small-denomination chips).
Also, the slow clock rate and smaller RAM size may have meant that the RAM chips used more current per bit, and thus taken longer to drain.
I was twelve. I was in the school library. And I was in love. We had only an hour together each day after school let out, and I didn't want to waste a minute. My friends had all headed home to leaf through their teen magazines, gaze at their music posters, and gossip about boys. They had their dreams...I had the real thing.
Sure, our relationship was a bit one-sided. He didn't say much; I told him what to do and he did it. Animated stick figures? Sure. "Guess a number from 1 to 100" games? No problem. I was clumsy at first, and he would often complain, uttering "?SYNTAX ERROR" when I did something that displeased him. Fortunately, as we got to know each other better, these little outbursts became less frequent.
I must confess that for a while, I was obsessed with killing him. I had heard that if I POKEd him in a particular place, he'd explode. On several occasions, I'd start running a program that POKEd values increasing from 0, hoping to get to the magic number. Alas, my plans were always thwarted by the school librarian. She'd come around and turn him off at closing time.
Eventually, we grew apart. I still visited him from time to time, but meanwhile, I was spending more and more time with a friend's VIC-20. The menage a trois satisfied me for a few months, but came to an abrupt end when my parents introduced me to a C64.
Since that time, I've gone through numerous relationships with other computers. The 8088, the 486, all kinds of Pentiums, and my latest fling, the Sparc. It's been fun, but my fondest memories will always be of heavy PETting in the library after school.
Yqy...K ecp'v dgnkgxg aqw cevwcnna vqqm vjg vkog vq vtcpuncvg oa uki. Kh aqw vjkpm vjku ku tkfkewnqwu, tgcf oa dkq.
That was the first computer I ever used...
I was forteen years old, and my uncle, a Hewlett-Packard engineer, lent us one for a few months.
Ironic that playboy brings up where I lost my technical virginity.
I still remember the first program I ever wrote:
10 A=1
20 print A
30 LET A = A + 1
40 GOTO 20
It also had the first bug I ever found, as it printed something like:
1.00000
2.00000
3.00000
3.99999
5.00000
6.00000
(Floating point was still problematic back then.)
The cake is a pie
For specs on just about any old computer you can think of (and more than a few you can't), go to www.computingmuseum.com. Surf down 2 pages to the museum and have a gander. I myself used to have the TRS-80 model 1 level 2, the Aquarius 1 by Mattel (YES MATTEL makers of Barbie), and a laser Apple 2 compatible. Great blast from the past... I reccomend it to anyone who has played with old computers or has been computing a while.
Nostalgia just aint what it used to be.
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
My parents bought a Commodore CBM-8032 in 1983, and it's what hooked me on computers. I still have a huge number of the cryptic SYS and POKE commands programmed into my fingers -- I sat down at an emulator recently, wondered out loud what was the system command to hard-reboot the machine, and my fingers typed SYS 64790 without the slightest hesitation. Eerie!
The best PET/CBM/C64/VIC/etc emulator is the VICE emulator. I recommend it to anyone running Unix, MS-DOS, Win95/NT, OS/2 or RiscOS who wants to remember the good old Commodore beasts. I've used it in the DOS and Windows versions, but not since I migrated (graduated?) to Linux. I might just check it out tho...
: Fruitbat :
I have discovered a truly remarkable
I've got to learn to post this kind of thing anonymously.
``Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators.'' -- Richard Dawkins