On the day of Apple's 50th birthday, I'm over here playing with one of their earliest competitors: the iconic Commodore PET 2001!

Posted by wowbobwow@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 3 comments

On the day of Apple's 50th birthday, I'm over here playing with one of their earliest competitors: the iconic Commodore PET 2001!

I found this PET at a local junk shop last fall, along with some accessories and software (on cassette tape!). The machine seemed to be booting to BASIC but the display was badly garbled and basically unusable. I'm reasonably comfortable doing basic electronics repairs, replacing through-hole capacitors, etc., but anything involving CRT's are outside my comfort zone. Thankfully I've got a go-to guy for this kind of work (hi Sean, if you're reading this!) and he was able to do some really excellent repair work on the CRT. There's a bit of downwards bowing in the image which I'm sure he can fix, but honestly I kind of love how it looks - something about it feels right, even if it's not perfectly within factory spec.

Going by the tags on the rear of the case, this PET left the factory as a 2001-8N model with 8KB of RAM, but there's a handwritten note mentioning that it was upgraded to 32KB, which is also reflected in the BASIC boot-screen. I've recently purchased a clever gadget called an SD2PET, which goes into the expansion ports on the rear of the machine and allows it to use an SD card as if it were a floppy drive - that's how I got TRON loaded for this picture.

My family and I are going to be exhibiting this machine for public hands-on play at the California Historical Radio Society Museum in Alameda, CA on Saturday. If you happen to be in the Bay Area and want to pet a PET (and/or play with around a dozen other rare computers and gaming consoles we're bringing), come on down!