Commodore History Part 1- The PET

Comments · 2.7K

• PI

  @PinoyBowlerGS92 · 7 years ago

  Mr. Iwata (President of Nintendo from 2002-2015) was great at programming games on the PET

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• DA

  @DasHemdchen · 1 year ago (edited)

  Great. My piano teacher was obsessed with the Pet, and instead of teaching me to play piano, he taught me how to program the Pet. That shaped my life in a very favourable way.😀

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• A.

  @a.wright281 · 8 years ago

  1: Hey I just got a pet!<br>2: Wow! What is it? A dog? A cat?<br>1: No, it&apos;s a commodore

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• AL

  @alexanderm8892 · 11 months ago

  Rewatching in 2025, it&apos;s so cozy and well narrated :)

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• GU

  @guilherm502 · 6 years ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP9y_7it3ZM&amp;t=420">7:00</a> Yes, I paused to read that nonsense ;-)

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• LY

  @lyrabon · 9 years ago

  WARNING if you feed the PET chips after midnight it will byte you!

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• VW

  @vwestlife · 9 years ago

  The &quot;killer poke&quot; originally had a useful purpose: on the older PETs, it would speed up the text display. It was only on the later PETs with the updated design that it would make the video go out of sync and potentially damage the CRT circuitry. After this was discovered, Commodore updated the circuitry to make the CRT immune to the killer poke. So in reality, only a small number of PETs are affected, and actual, verified reports of damage caused by it are rare.

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• ST

  @StormsparkPegasus · 6 years ago

  This is the computer that Satoru Iwata started out on when he decided to get into programming.

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• CA

  @Calilasseia · 7 years ago

  Ah, memories. The PET was the first genuine &quot;microcomputer&quot; I used. Prior to that, computing was done using a steam powered terminal hooked up to a mainframe over the phone line. A giant mechanical Olivetti terminal that weighed as much as a small AFV, and made almost as much noise during operation. The PET was a <b>huge</b> relief when you come from that background!<br><br>Using an IEEE-488 interface was a stroke of genius on the part of the PET designers. This is because the IEEE-488 interface was the standard for scientific instrumentation in the 1980s, and as a consequence, you could plug everything from mass spectrometers to desktop sized centrifuges into the PET, and the PET would drive them with a short program consisting of about 25-30 lines of BASIC. Indeed, I used one to drive a weird piece of industrial engraving machinery in 1983, because the machinery used an IEEE-488 interface, and once you understood what commands to send to the machine, you could drive the machine with a 30-line BASIC program. Plug and Play, 1980s style!

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• EC

  @ecospider5 · 7 years ago

  I remember the pet in 3rd grade. We had a manual typewriter at home so yes I instantly recognized the keyboard was &nbsp;ridiculous.

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• AN

  @AndrosynthNuclear · 9 years ago

  The Demoscene has some truly mythical programming skills

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• WI

  @wilsonj4705 · 3 years ago

  &quot;4k is a ridiculously small amount of RAM&quot;<br>ZX80: Hold my byte

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