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."

Static RAM?

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.

You never forget your first time :)

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.

Sigh...

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.)

Re:What's the point?

Perhaps it is not sex, but age. To some of us old farts, the Commodore PET is "News for Nerds". Hell, that box is what made me a geek in the first place.

Specs and such

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 [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.

Re:nice...but what were the specs?

Check out The Machine Room [ed.ac.uk] for specs on this and many other classic 8-bit machines. I believe the PET 2001 had 8K RAM, a tape drive, a built-in screen and Commodore BASIC, a MicroSoft BASIC from about 1981, and a bizarre variant on ASCII that they called CBMSCII (ka-boomsky?). Later versions fixed some bugs, added a few extra commands to the BASIC, and replaced the chiclet keyboard with a very good quality one. It got up to 32K RAM using a 6502 chip, and possibly more with some psychotic paging techniques.

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. [cmu.edu] 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 :

Re:What's the point?

Oh sure... you read slashdot for the articles... :-)
--

You're mistaken

No, no, no, you've got it all wrong: Penthouse featured PETs; Playboy featured BUNNIES (Beauties Undressed / Nearly-Nude, Idiotic but Enchanting Sex-objects.) (Or was the "IE" part for "Impotence-Eliminating"?)

I've got to learn to post this kind of thing anonymously.

Re:What's the point?

Maybe I'm just a female who could care less about playboy . . .

But maybe you should care a little bit more about your history.

The point is, if you don't know where you come from, you don't know where you're going. Do you know when and where computer-based video-conferencing was first demonstrated? (Try 30 years ago [stanford.edu], Stanford and SF.) How about what the first personal computer was? (Guess again [blinkenlights.com].) Can you identify the first clamshell-style laptop [sinasohn.com]? (Or the second [sinasohn.com]?)

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it. If you want to learn more, check out the Vintage Computer Festival [vintage.org]. (You can also check out my collection [sinasohn.com].)