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Technology

PET Computer Article, Circa 1978 193

Posted by emmett from the a-bargain-at-$595 dept.
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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PET Computer Article, Circa 1978 More

PET Computer Article, Circa 1978

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  • Re:What's the point? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

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

    oh, spare us the lame 'golly, i'm a girl and someone just mentioned playboy and i think i'm supposed to be offended or something' horseshit. face it - you got distracted by the fact that it said 'playboy' and missed the entire point of the article - the computer. your geek-barbie comment is the only thing that is incongruous in this scenario.

  • Re:Outta my league... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Hang the terminal off a spare serial line on a linux box, and use it as an extra login. I do that with a terminal, and it's dead handy for logging in if the (prerelease) X Server crashes - no magic sysrq'ing or typing blind in the hope of safely rebooting the box - you just login on your terminal kill -9 X, restart X, and restore your display - preserving your uptime !
    add S0:respawn:2345:/sbin/getty ttyS0 DT9600 vt320 to /etc/inittab, and you're away.

  • Re:Static RAM? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Ram in all CBM 8-bits was CMOS. Slow, but reliable. The C64 manual used to advise turning off the computer for 30 seconds minimum to clear the memory - there reset-resident viruses on the C64 (and C128) even back then...
  • It not about gender, it's not even about information. It is just pure nostalgia of the time when drawing something on a TV screen was a considered impressive. Gives a bit a perspective about how far we've come from, and makes one wonder about how far we're going to go.

    OTOH, at that time, personal computers still had a "toys for boys only" social sticker on them. Stupid, but heh, we can't rewrite history. Hence the presence of such an article in a magazine which target market is men.

    OG.
  • Perhaps you didn't actually read the article, or perhaps your definition of "informative" differs severely from mine, but this is one of the few on-topic articles Slashdot has these days. Would you rather read about the latest consumer computer hardware (for 1978), or Andover's award show, packed full of truly insipid little masturbatory categories? If computers aren't your thing, I could see how you might be up for an article on how high-school ruined your life; Jon Katz wants to tell you that. Perhaps another copyright or patent lawsuit article would be better--all that excitement in just one paragraph, don't know if I can take all that law. Again. This week.

    --

  • I know that he went on to Atari after getting out of Commodore, but what happened to him after Atari went ballzup?

  • I have a PET that I'm about to throw away. I booted it last about 10 years ago but it probably needs a filter capacitor in the power supply (I think I stole it) and a belt for the cassette deck. If I remember right it has been "upgraded" to 8K RAM but it has the old chiclet keyboard. Somebody added a handle to the rear of the case. I have a cassette with a couple of programs too. Anybody that wants this thing can have it, but you probably don't want to pay for the shipping as it is quite heavy.

  • Same here. Our high school had 5 or 6 of them and one even had a floppy drive. I spent tons of time playing around with the PETs. They were the reason the janitors had to kick me out of the computer lab at 7 or 8pm.

  • I remember Toker. Some friends of mine would play that during study hall. I seem to remember that if the guy hit a seed it would make him cough or something. That game was forgotten as soon as the couple Franklin Apple clones. Then it was on to some 16 color pirate game.

  • MS has written something small enough to work in it... they made the BASIC interpreter for the 8-bit Commodores =)

  • Naked women!
    Everywhere I look - sex! I come to slashdot to get away from it!

    I haven't done it since April 1997.
    This is like pouring petrol on the fire!

    Waaaa!
  • Spectrum?
    I was too poor for one of them. I had a ZX81 with a multi-tasking FORTH ROM (ny Skywave Software).

    It's still in the cupboard at my parents; house ;-)
  • Tweaking Lemonade Stand on a PET in 5th grade is what got me started programming. People will pay alot of money for lemonade when it's 10000 degrees out. Although, the Apple II's were fun... We used to do things like take the floppies and controller cards from several, and make 1 with 8 floppy drives on it... Remember the koala pads? Flight Simulator on a green screen....
  • On the bright side, I doubt MS could have ever written anything small enough to work on it

    Doh, they wrote the BASIC that was in the PET ROMs. I believe they also wrote some games for the PET.
  • The 8008 was, IIRC, the 8 bit version of the 4 bit 4004, which was the one they developed for the Busicom calculator instead of using an expensive handfull of logic chips.
  • I'd like to take this moment to point out that nomatter what the real reasons may have been, the entire Slashdot Posting Squad IS male...
  • I wanna see it!
  • OK, name 800 of them that publish short stories. Now name 800 of them that you can actually purchase within 5 miles of your home.

    See the point? What's one of the biggest mags you can publish your short story in? What magazine will actually get circulated to more than 10 people in a college town? Thousands of small publishers that nobody ever heard of. The big ones are mostly all gone now.

  • Re:Sigh... (Score:1)

    by PD ( 9577 )
    That was my first program too, but my first version was about 25 lines long.

    I had nothing but questions back then. I even remember testing if it was possible to assign a variable to another variable.

    30 let a=i

    All my experiments stayed in that little program, so by the time it could print out consecutive numbers it was 25 lines long.

  • Yes, we had some in 5th grade.

    I still remember the joys of typing BASIC programs from some book chock-full of games like King, Queen, Wumpus, poker, etc. "Basic Games" and "Basic Games II" were huge at my school.

    Space Invaders was cool cuz it used those alternate characters (and inverse characters) and looked KINDA like the real game.

    My friend in 5th grade wrote a cool car-driving game. Amazed the class. But that, the TRS-80, and the TI-99 were my first exposures to computers.

    Then the Apple II came to town and everything changed.

    W
    -------------------
  • Heheh I remember those darn things!

    It had an awful slow tape thing built in, and it kinda looked funny with the lil monitor built on top of it...

    Every once and a while the screen would go weird on it... and me being a lil brat, just screwed open the thing and pushed the chips in there a lil... well... it *did* help.... for a while ;)

    I played pacman on it... and space invaders, i think... *sigh* good 'ole times, when life was easy :)
  • I used to be in a programming group that did this all the time, pick a cool name for the program and then justify it by claiming that it was an acronym. That was part of the fun of being a programmer.
  • Anyone remember this chip? Had probably the coolest and most powerful instruction set of any of the 8 bitters. I learned assembly on one of these, THEN had to go back and learn it again on a 6502 machine.... (bummer) There was a multiuser version of os/9 ported to the tandy color computer series of machines. I guess it is another example of the best tech not getting the limelight... Not relevant, but tandy actually clocked down their color computer series of machines in order to lessen their competetive edge compared to the tandy 1000 series. There was a register that you could poke to boot the clock back to the normal speeds.

    Anyway I remember wanting to get a PET with the 6809 option, but decided not to because there was more 6502 software.

  • Man, You are not kidding! Wonder just how long these facts will stick around. Rainbow magazine was great. I learned a lof from those pages.

    You know there were quite a number of good hacks for that machine. I used to use one that increased the already fast tape drive to 2400 baud. Good for the day. It was very tolerant as well as it used actual d-a a-d conversion for the data. Most of the others used digital, or cheap square waves that were both overly noisy, and very intolerant of speed changes. The COCO tape would deal with all of that, and had filenames!

    I never used the keyboard code hack, but did see one coco overclocked. I can't remember which one 2 or 3, but basically you lost the video. If you were running os9, then you could get the additional speed, and just use a terminal via serial port.

    I think hitachi made 6809E clones. The will clock to about 12Mhz these days. Still a pretty good choice if you are going to have to use assembler to build your project. There is probably no easier instruction set.

    Later,
  • I remember getting one of these as my 8th grade graduation present because we couldn't afford anything else. I wrote a bunch of programs for it in BASIC and stored them to tape and let my little sisters play on it. A math tutor (that printed out results), address book, diary app, all kinds of kewl stuff for a 12 year old to do. All that for the wonderful price of $100.00US.

    What sucks is that nothing I learned on it then is worth anything now (it was an antique when WE got it!).

    Sometimes I miss that thing, just because I could do anything on it. It's more fun to solve problems for myself when my understanding of the environment isn't the primary limiting factor.

    Life goes on... :o)
  • Wow ... GREAT reply. Full of pertinent info. You really showed me that while I have no idea what I'm talking about, you are absolutely *full* of knowledge.

    Let's try this again.

    1. There are less and less small publishers due to conglomeration, rising costs, and competition from large chains, and other entertainment options.

    2. More importantly, there are less and less small bookstores willing to *carry* "non-grisham" books.

    3. How many independent publishers are carried by the "big 3" bookstores?

    And finally, using you as an example, americans are less likely than ever to get off their asses and go out of their way to attempt to patronize stores other than wal-mart and mcdonalds.

    Go back to sleep, sweetie. It'll all be over soon.
  • Actually, sadly it's getting smaller and smaller. All the sheeple just wanna buy the latest danielle steele or tom clancy at the wal-mart along with some m&m's and frozen dinners. It's surprising we have any publishers left at all!
  • Have you ever read slashdot? This is one of the few actual articles on here; maybe because it *was* written before 1990. Or does playboy scare you?

    On a side note, I wonder how many people are unable to read this article because it's been blocked by netnanny or it's ilk?
  • Microsoft added code from Microsoft basic to Commodore basic on the C128 and the Microsoft copyrite is from Microsofts basic... not from the first Pet basic...
    Microsofts copyrite dose not show up on any of the other Commodore 8 bits...
    To make maters more confusing... it's the date Microsoft last updated the copyrite so it's not the same year Microsoft first made Microsoft basic..

    There are some clear diffrences in the Microsoft code and the Commodore code.. those diffrences introduced bugs into the C128..

    People would like to blame the long standing history of bugs in Commodore basic on Microsoft however that history is also found in Commodore hardware and not in Microsoft basic during that time piriod...

    Basicly Commodore develupers were allways in a rush to get the project they were working on into a state where it can be shown at a computer show... This is where they live or die..

    Microsoft however was pritty content to take there time and get things right... Microsoft basic however did suffer from feature stuffing Microsoft would fix the bugs before shipping.. or remove the defective features...

    Dos was where Microsoft first started releasing buggy code... Windows where they first started producing bloat...

    With Commodore the R&D costs were reduced simply becouse the beta was a "release it and see if any anyone reports bugs" method...
  • > Microsofts copyrite dose not show up on any of
    > the other Commodore 8 bits...

    Yep, it does. My first computer was a PET 4016 (16k Ram) and it definitely had software by "Micro Soft" in the ROM, because you could peek for that string.

  • This is so cool to see - the PET was my first computer, bought second hand in late 1983 in New Zealand. As well as the interminable wait for tapes to load, and having to write down lots of tape counter references in order to use C-60's for storage, I remember that my PET 4016 (with 16k RAM) would stay on all day through a frenzy of programming, with a loud buzz from the power supply gradually rising in intensity, and would then freeze solid after about 12 hours. Shit shit shit...

    Also my grandfather made an amp for it from an old trannie radio, which plugged into the 'User Port' at the back, and we then installed it internally in that acre of white metal above the keyboard. Wow, custom hardware!

    Lastly, you could buy custom ROM chips for it (from a company named Arrow?) which would give you more BASIC commands like cursor positioning. We borrowed an Arrow chip from another PET, broke a leg off it while getting it out, and simply soldered it back on. Try that these days. Not to mention that when I had to give the Arrow chip back all my code broke because it depended on the extra routines...

    What a machine!
  • The original apple macs changed disk spin speed based on head position, giving 800k 3.5 inch floppies, when the PC had 720k. That's why DD Mac formatted disks can't be read by PC hardware (Apple then changed to ordinary 1440k disk formats (except with their weird twin-pronged filesystem, of course))

    Of course, the amiga formatted the same 3.5 inch floppies to 880k without variable spin-speed trickery...
  • Wow, memories... The PET was my first computer... My uncle gave it to me when I was 6, litte chicklet keyboard, built in tape drive, something like 16K of ram... Boy was I happy when I got my C64 at 8 =)
  • Hi I have a CBM PET upgraded to a whopping 96KB with dual 5.25 inch floppy drive. It works nicely and even has a copy of visicalc and database and a few manuals. Strangely enough if you open up the floppy cabinet (very big and heavy) it has 2 ... yes 2 6502's in it LOL twice whats in the actual PET. Any how do you know where I can perhaps get software for this computer ? btw i paid £50 for it over 9 years ago from an ex employer... Hawker Sidley, do you think they used it to design the harrier jump jet ;)
  • That was my first, with the 16K RAM expansion so I could play Frogger. About the size of a desktop calculator, with a printer that printed on paper like register receipts and a tape recorder for saving programs that I typed in on that impossibly small keyboard.

    On second thought, forget it. As soon as I got my Vic20, I forgot it.

  • talk about taking you back -- try using an old coco3 and an orchestra 90 add in board to control 8 lights (8 pins on DAC in to control it)... add a timing loop program that was modifiable (press a key, wait for next beat of music, press key again) and you could make one heck of a cheap light show...
  • On the same page, you'll find a link to Playboy's "next-gen sexual experience" article, describing Everyman's next fantasy (once we're bored of hot tubs, silicon and bisexuality of course).

    Sorry to Slashdot readers however, because the aliens aren't interested in humans in our IQ range.

    We'll make great PETs.
  • 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$..

    Heh. Someone moderate this up as "funny."

  • I heard of them and yes they were very innovative. They were designed by the same guy who designed the commodore pet. (Chuck Peddle)

    I did some contract work for Kodak in the 80's and they used the Victor 4000 to control Microfiche printers. (The Tandy 2000 and Victor 4000 were both very innovative MS-DOS compatibles introduced during this period, but since they weren't also PC-Compatible they failed miserably.)

    By the way ... I believe that Steve Wozniak's floppy controller (Apple) used the same variable speed techniques.

    -Eric
  • I once typed in a whole listing of Space Invaders from some mag on a school PET - POKE'd straight into memory. I must have got a byte or two wrong because the program crashed. Luckily I had read in a BYTE magazine article that if you were very quick with the off-on switch, sometimes the "little RAM chips would be forgiving enough to keep most of your code."

    I tried this and it actually worked! Does anyone with more knowledge of the PET know why this was possible? RAM refresh not as unforgiving in those days? I'd really like to know :)

  • Anyone got a link? The surf nazis at work here have playboy blocked.
    Gee, and I was really going to read the article...honest.

  • {homer}
    mmmmm...retro computing....
    {/homer}

    Seriously though, what were the specs for these machines, and how did they compare to the ubiquitous Apple II's that most schools had instead?

    I'm assuming my Vic20 with it's blazing 3.5K was one of the offspring of this fellow, but how did the original rate?

  • "ME T00"
    (This comment brought to you by H4X0RK1D999@AOL.COM)
    Seriously, please post it somewhere!
    (Wouldn't it be cool if you could post to slashdot with attachments?)
  • About the lightshow. I wonder, has anyone here on slashdot older than about 25 *NOT* built a light show with their home computer? Seems everyone I've met hooked up a few triacs to a parallel port or something. (I was wierd, I rectified the AC and used thyristors. :)
  • damn im impressed. you seem to have skipped the whole NeXT machine line tho..adding those to your existing collection would be kewl. besides, i could use the pictures. :)
  • Some of you might be interested to know that 8-bit Commodore computers are still alive and in use. In fact, there's even an active hardware company that can sell you a 2GB hard drive, a 20-MHz CPU accelerator with 16MB of RAM, a 16-MB RAM disk with battery backup, a UART chip, and a high-density floppy disk for your Commodore 64. Check out:
  • Doublespeed POKE:

    CoCo 1 (some models) and 2 - POKE 65495,0

    CoCo 3 - Poke 65497,0

    To shift down:

    CoCo 1 (some models) and 2 - POKE 65494,0

    CoCo 3 - Poke 65496,0

    Remember to clock down when writing to disk or tape, then back up...

    BTW - from what I remember, in one of the last issues of Rainbow Magazine (the ones that were printed on newsprint, and looked like a newspaper), there was featured a program that would speed up the system about double again, by replacing the keyboard handling routine with a better version. There also used to be a way to replace the CPU with a different (Hitachi?) CPU that was a clone, but could be clocked up further via a crystal change. However, since the crystal in the CoCo controlled the video and disk as well as the CPU, changing this could cause unpredicatable (or predictable - it simply wouldn't work!) results.

    It's scary what you remember after nearly 15 years!
  • Stupid moderat0r. When you don't understand what's going on don't go do it. It wasn't an insult or a troll. The band, Porno for Pyros, their song, Pets.

    Moderaters are like the dinosaurs.

  • There is some stuff that needs correcting or clarifying in that list.

    The 800 could come with less than 48K RAM, and had at least one memory expansion slot that the 400 didn't have.

    The 1400XL was not a successor to the 1450XLD, but rather they were both members of a set of four computers that were once planned to be released. I think the first two in the list may have been the 600XL and the 800XL, but don't quote me on that -- it's been a long time.

    The 65XE had ithe typical 64K of RAM as opposed to the 130XE's 128K.

    You could replace with extra 64K RAM in the 130XE with 256K, 512K, or 1024K through a couple different hacks described in text files that floated around the BBS's. Some DOS's (e.g. SpartaDos, MyDos) had ram disk programs that would support such an upgrade, and this was how the extra RAM was used most of the time.

    The 130XE's extra memory (whatever amount you happened to have) was bank switched 16K at a time by one of those FREDDIE chips mentioned in another review. The 65XE lacked this chip.

    I'll cut it off here.

    P.S. that web site has too many frames.

  • ... was an arrow-key action game called Adventure written for the PET. The version published had been rewritten by a classmate for the TRS-80 and wound up in the back of a SoftSider (?) magazine from 1981-1982. (Anybody still have those?)

    The magazine was having a contest for programs with less than 1K of source as "KByters" they could run as the last column in the mag. I forget what the dollar amount of the prize was, but I remember the classmate kept every darn dime...

    Last code I ever open-sourced. ;^[

    Still, the PET rocked. I still can type one-handed, I learned how by holding a magazine in one hand and pressing chiclet keys with the other. (I still can't type two-handed from learning that way...) And I still treasure the poorly-laminated piece of red construction paper that certifies me a member of PETCO, the high-school computer organization.
  • It seems by the photo the PET computer was state of the art for viewing Star Trek photos and porn( Playboy bunny).
    Then here we are 22 years later. The only things that have changed are the colours and the speed to which we can View Star Trek and porn.

    Wordstar anyone?
  • I remember the Commadore PET Computer...

    I remember in 1st grade when we used to play a really old version of Oregon Trail all free-time long (btw, the 'Hunting' was made up of guessing which line of the screen (1-32?) a piece of 'Food' was, and then you shot to see if you were right... after a while you are right every time).

    Anyway, that was my first experience with computers, and I already knew more than the teachers ^^.

    Then, they decided to get rid of the non-working models, so they had me go and check each one to see if it was in good working order (What an honor for a 1st grader, ne?).

    This is when the bad thing happened. As it turned out, one of the computers I had never used before was not only broken, but the cylindrical plastic cover near the 'on/off' switch on the back left of the machine was broken off, and had been replaced by nylon tape (which had fallen off) so that when I reached back to turn it on, I managed to give myself a good jolt of electrity.

    I don't know how bad it was, but it was bad enough that my hand clutched the computer so that I couldn't do anything but stand there and get fried until I fell over.

    Anyways, This is the story of how I got into computers. Anybody know how many volts I got? I've been wondering that for a long time.

  • Depends. I don't have to set my proxy at work and we still have a firewall with a banned site list. And the first one doesn't change your proxy anyway. Try it.

  • Actually, now *you're* mistaken. Playboy features Playmates. The Playboy Bunnies were the hostesses at the old Playboy Clubs. There were occasional pictorials of Bunnies in the magazine, but the monthly centerfold model is the Playmate of the Month.
  • Thousands. Literally. Bookstores and reasonably stocked libraries carry the Directory of Small Publishers and Magazines from Dustbooks (http://www.dustbooks.com/) which is quite a compendium of small and mid-sized presses. There are several other small press directories.

    I think the original poster meant most respected mainstream publishers of short fiction. I'd still take issue. Alice K. Turner is a fine editor and she still manages to get some decent fiction published in Playboy, but there are still other magazines closer to the mainstream that publish more fiction (The New Yorker, Harper's, The Atlantic Monthly).

    As someone who publishes a small magazine of fiction, I can vouch that there is no shortage of outlets for short fiction writers to get published (on paper) in the US. Get published and *paid* or published to a mass audience, that's a different story.

    ObOnTopic: I'm sure that some stories submitted to Playboy two decades ago were composed on a PET.
  • I'm not allowed to open that link, 'cause if my girlfriend saw "playboy.com" in my history, she'd kill me.

    Sigh.

  • Anyone like me who used a Heathkit H-8 computer might remember its boot sequence:

    REG PC ALTER 030 000 ALTER GO

    (Unless you had the nifty auto-start PAM-8 ROM mod kit, that is)

  • WOW, the Koala Pad. You just took me down a stroll through memory lane!!! I completely forgot about those.

    I guess that I am an average to young slashdotter (23 years old), but I had a C64 with a Koala pad. Now that I think about it, I wonder if that is why I am so interested in computers and art. Currently I am a Computer Science major, but I plan on going back to school to get a masters in art.

    I also remember writing programs like lemonade stand and such from those BASIC programming books. I think that I was too young to understand the code, but I had fun typing it in and trying to run it.

    Ahhh, the good ole days, thanks Slashdot for the memories.

    eric
    ------------------------------------------ --

  • Mirror Site (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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
  • 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!

  • 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).
  • 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.


  • Ah, the IBM 5100 debate...
    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!

    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 [sinasohn.com], GRiD Compass [sinasohn.com], Sharp PC-5000, Panasonic HHC, Epson HX-20 [sinasohn.com], TRS-80 Model 100 [sinasohn.com], and of course the Compaq Portable.

    You can see more venerable portable computers in my collection [sinasohn.com], or elsewhere on the web. You can see many of them in person at the next Vintage Computer Festival [vintage.org].

  • Take a look at my other response (with a subject of What's the point? or something like that.) You need to know your history to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

    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^)

  • I don't recall Apple as having pawned their Apple ][ off as being "portable." (Apple ][ was introduced in 1977) Neither was the Altair (1975).

    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.)

  • At the last three Vintage Computer Festivals [vintage.org], there has been at least one Commodore Pet up and running on display, as well as many other fascinating, historic machines. There are also plenty of great talks and a swap meet where you can start your own collection, or just pick up your own first computer.

    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 [sinasohn.com] on-line as well.)

  • My interest is mainly in portable computers, which NeXT never made, afaik. There are images out there of them. Try the NeXT Information Page [channelu.com] or this NeXT site [angelfire.com] or this one [www.next.de] if you speak German.

    There's a picture [sfsu.edu] in Hal Layer's [sfsu.edu] collection, or check out Deep Space Tech [deepspacetech.com] if you want to buy one.

    And of course, we have to have the obligatory Linux on NeXT [geocities.com] link.

  • 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.

    ------------------

  • 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!


    ---
  • 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... :)


  • 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....


  • 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.
  • ... 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$..
  • Actually, I first learned to program on an 8k PET with the funny little snap-on-top keys with the symbols written on paper under the snap-on tops. Yes, it was a crap machine - but it was one of the very first computers which ordinary people could actually buy. I've actually still got a PET - a later, 32k model with a proper keyboard and twin disk drives. And yes, it still works.

    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.

  • 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!

    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 :) then on to an Apple LISA (anyone remember *them*? :) and an IBM-PC.

    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 :) Shit - my toaster has more RAM than a VIC-20 :)
  • Those won't work if your company uses a proxy server for web access. You have to set your browser's proxy setting to anonymizer or proxymate, which means you'll no longer be able to go through your company's proxy server, which kind of defeats the purpose.
    Right now I have to have my modem dialed in to another ISP, with the addresses I need to go to (for some reason the Surf Nazis are blocking The Onion!) listed in the "do not use proxy for addresses beginning with..." section. They load more slowly but I can get to them.
  • I still use my 8K pet for some of those old classic BASIC games. Remember Dungeon? One of my fondest memories is my uncle rewriting it to say 'twat' and 'angry pimp' instead of 'grue' and 'fire newt' ;^). I fire it up about once a week to make sure everything grooves. I was seven years old when my uncle purchased the machine for $1100 (a ransom in '77!)

    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...

  • Ah, the good old days of the CBM 2001. When I was in HS in 1982 we had a computer lab full of those. As I recall our first units had the chicklet keyboard and 4K of RAM.

    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! :-)

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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

  • Static RAM? (Score:3)

    by acb ( 2797 ) on Sunday January 30, 2000 @04:51AM (#1322949) Homepage
    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 :) (Score:3)

    by Cowardly Anonym ( 30327 ) on Saturday January 29, 2000 @11:58PM (#1322950)

    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... (Score:3)

    by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Saturday January 29, 2000 @11:28PM (#1322951) Homepage Journal
    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? (Score:3)

    by ucblockhead ( 63650 ) on Saturday January 29, 2000 @11:30PM (#1322952) Homepage Journal
    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 (Score:3)

    by Spazmoid ( 75087 ) on Saturday January 29, 2000 @11:47PM (#1322953)
    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? (Score:3)

    by eric.t.f.bat ( 102290 ) on Saturday January 29, 2000 @11:54PM (#1322954)
    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? (Score:3)

    by karmma ( 105156 ) on Sunday January 30, 2000 @05:27AM (#1322955)
    Oh sure... you read slashdot for the articles... :-)
    --

  • You're mistaken (Score:3)

    by ScottMaxwell ( 108831 ) on Sunday January 30, 2000 @02:15AM (#1322956) Homepage
    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? (Score:5)

    by UncleRoger ( 9456 ) on Sunday January 30, 2000 @12:57AM (#1322957) Homepage
    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].)

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