Commodore PET – The Worlds First Personal Computer | Hacker News Reader

Commodore PET – The Worlds First Personal Computer

commodore.ca

68 pointsandsoitis33 comments

Old man story time. This was the first computer we had in our home, I believe in the summer of 1978 or 1979. Mom was working on her Masters in education (high school mathematics) and also taking Fortran courses on Hofstra’s PDP-11. She took me (~6 years old) to the machine room once, and one of the bearded sysadmins printed me a giant ASCII art of Snoopy on his doghouse on white and green fanfold paper with a dot matrix printer.

Her high school took delivery of its first ever computer, a PET with a chiclet keyboard. She was assigned to take it home over the summer to learn, and figure out how to use in the curriculum.

A few memories- it was the first piece of electronic equipment in the house with a grounded plug, and the house had no grounded outlets. Most people would have used a cheezy adapter, but Dad sledgehammered an 8’ copper rod in the backyard and installed a single grounded outlet for it.

The cassette loading could be very fiddly and slow. A favorite game was “Hangman”, played that for hours. Observe the beautiful graphics.

https://youtu.be/jnj2ZgOYYDQ?is=zZauKOy5f95wDqrg

The PET went back to the school in the fall, and I started begging for a PC of my own. For the longest time I was constantly asking for a Timex/Sinclair. Christmas 1983, a TI-99/4a appeared under the tree, thanks to them being sold far below cost after failing in the market. That lead to an Apple //e in 1987, and a Dell 486 DX2-66 in 1993.

I had the same TI. And it started my career. And I have one in my garage I’m not sure works but I cannot get rid of it! Too sentimental!

I have two of them, one totally stock, the other hotrodded with f18a DVI video output, a FinalGROM cartridge with the complete cartridge library one SD card, and a whopping 32k sidecar memory upgrade. And homemade joysticks built with Sanwa arcade mechanisms to replace the awful TI ones. Makes PARSEC playable. There are some pretty neat modern homebrew games, too.

https://dnotq.io/f18a/intro.html

https://endlos99.github.io/finalgrom99/

https://thebrewingacademy.com/products/ti-99-4a-32k-external...

I had a different home computer, with a cassette player hooked up to it, and I remember well having to fiddle with volume and tone controls to get things to load. I'd always been envious of Commodores and the like, which came with what I assumed was a specially built and calibrated tape drive, so surprised when you said it was quite fiddly to load as well. What kind of adjustments could you make to get stuff to load properly?

That sounds like a Tandy, at least, they just used a normal tape recorded with an adapter for mic/headphones. And people had to fiddle as you say, I think.

Not the person you're replying to but I remember loading games from tape on the Commodore 64 could be fiddly as well. Not sure about adjustments (today I am spoiled, having a disk drive for my 64) because I was a kid back then. I just remember how frustrating it was to see "LOAD ERROR" after waiting for what felt like an eternity. I think we just rewound the tape tried again.

Same year, 78'ish, my Dad takes me to his associates new office, where his assistant has just unpacked the brand new Commodore Pet. "We have no idea what to do with it, we just know we need it", says the associate.

I spend the afternoon unattended making pictures with PETSCII and poking around the user interface, which I remember as being difficult, and the very first time I encountered BASIC.

Been programming ever since. Literally still got almost every machine I ever hacked on in between now and then, also. ;)

The PET lives on in odd ways. I use the PET font, long since hoisted out of the ROMs by several people and via Unscii and Funscii, as the medium weight font for virtual terminals on my own Linux-based, NetBSD, and FreeBSD machines.

It pairs up nicely with the BBC Micro graphics font as the bold weight, as the PET characters have thinner (bitmap) 'strokes' than the BBC ones. Moreover, since they were originally 8×8 (although I have run them through an upscaler to get 16×16, and strictly the PET was 7×7) they work better with CJKV and 'square' character cells than 9×16 PC fonts do.

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/tree/2.1.1f/

* https://github.com/jdebp/unscii/blob/2.1.1f/src/font-pet16.t...

I've also used Dragon (i.e. MC 6847T1) + Atari paired up for medium and bold, as there's a similar different in 'stroke' widths. But the MC 6847T1 has a limited 7-bit true 1963 ASCII repertoire. The PETSCII fonts have all of the PET's graphics characters as well, which of course are now mapped as of Unicode 13.

Some fellow, said font's author, is likely long since passed, and is now resting more peacefully.

I wonder of even a single byte I have written, will be still used decades from now.

I have seen some recent interviews with Leonard Tramiel, so I don't think he is dead yet.

The Unscii bitmap font for the PET came with no information at all. Thank you for that. I've just discovered https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29723782 too. So I'm going to add attribution at the top of my copy.

When the 1977 trinity came out, the PET was the most useful system overall simply due to having Microsoft BASIC. The Apple II had Woz's Integer BASIC and the TRS-80 had an enhanced Tiny BASIC. The following year they all had Microsoft BASIC available.

The PET had the worst keyboard but the most reliable tape system. It could simulate an 80x50 bitmap.

The TRS-80 won on availability, vastly outselling the others due to production and sales outlet capacity. The CPU was about 60% the speed of the others. It could simulate a 128x48 bitmap.

The Apple II had the best graphics (A real 280x192 bitmap mode (monochrome) or 140x192 and colours). Integer BASIC only supported 40x40 graphics. You needed more RAM to support the true bitmap modes. The price was 2 to 3 times higher than the other systems.

Way back in the 70s a PET was the platform for my first paying programming job. Given an equation for a transformer hysteresis curve with a couple of parameters, I was tasked to plot hysteresis curves graphically.

For maximum info-density and maximum aesthetics, I got deeply into the character set for block graphics, so that every position in the plot had the character that best fit the curves and made them as smooth and cool and informative as possible.

It was a great introduction to the craft.

A friend in high school had one. We wrote little BASIC programs that would randomly roll up NPC's for Dungeons and Dragons—print them out on his small sheet-feed printer.

The Commodore 700 is a nice looking machine, and often misattributed to Porsche Design.

I think his best work was at Atari on the ST line.

I had a friend who had the original PET with the small keyboard. Then when I started in the military in 1980 we had a course in basic computers and how to use then. One of these was a board with a hex display, where I managed to get it to display my name in the display.

But one day we were going to a 'real' computer lab, that was basically a room full of PET computers.

As I knew we were going back some days later, I quickly loaned a couple of cassette tapes from my friend, and the session became a bit more enjoyable, as we could play a lot of games now.

However, this was the version with the 'real' keyboard, which also meant that it had a newer ROM. So some of the old games didn't work on this version of the PET.

Nitpick: In Europe we used 220 Volts - not 220 Watts.

Commodore people love to claim "first" for the PET because it was announced in January 1977, but they didn't ship until much later, like in October or later

So if you actually wanted an 8-bit computer in the Summer of 1977 you would have been stuck getting an Apple II which you could actually purchase

The Altair 8800 was released in December 1974, so the definition of “personal computer” would have to exclude that somehow.

The Altair didn’t come with a keyboard or screen. Just a front panel with lights and switches (like a PDP-11, to be fair). So, the fact that it wasn’t an integrated system in one box all from the same manufacturer distinguishes it as a Mini/Micro Computer rather than a Personal Computer.

Yup. That's why you hear of the Apple II as one of the first personal computers, and not of the Apple I, which was a more advanced kit than most, but still required owners to supply their own case, power supply and keyboard.

I bought a TRS-80 as a 14-year old in 1979. Commodore Pet, Apple II, and TRS-80 were the only real options. The Altair was an entirely different beast. Take a look at the Altair advertisement in the wikipedia entry and you'll get the idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

Ironically that Wikipedia page states:

"It was the first commercially successful personal computer."

The PET was the first personable computer.

I mean it's gotta at least have a keyboard…

There's also a story that Chuck Peddle helped Steve Wozniak get the Apple II working. That's what Chuck said anyway, not sure if it was true.

Adn let's not forget the TRS-80, also available around the same time.

Jimmy Maher has some excellent articles on the history of early computers (with focus on videogames) in his blog.

https://www.filfre.net/2011/06/the-trash-80-part-1/

Semi-related: I was surprised to learn Commodore is not dead. After a hundred different bankruptcies and court cases, somebody managed to put together all trademark rights in 2025 and is now selling the 64 and they announced a flip phone, of all things, this year.

Yep it's "Perifractic"(or something) from the Retro Recipes YouTube channel that bought it.

The Kenebak 1 is the first according to the Computer History Museum

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computer...

I think the low bar for something to be called a PC needs to have a crt screen and a keyboard.

Also, the "P" in PET stands for Personal, probably as differentiation to mean a computer that you don't have to share. It's a response to the larger time-shared computers back in the day. The "personal computers" had keyboards and screens that looked very much like mainframe terminals.

It's also the only true 8-bit computer as both the data and address busses are only 8-bit.

A friend of mine gave me one of those back in the 90s. We named it, Ora Boris and programed it to be a magic eight ball. Decided to live up to its name and ate the tape that it was stored itself on (we forgot to clean the heads).

And yes, I realize Ora Boris is misspelled, iPhone voice transcription just cannot handle that one.

I owned one of those for a while. Was given to me by a friend back in the early 90s.

Aside from a huge power under the hood, ha ha ha, it also had heft. You could definitely stun a cow with that thing.

And power? We named it ouraborus and programed it to be a magic eight ball. However, sadly, it decided to live up to its name, and consumed the cassette tape that it was stored on. Those tape machines out of tenancy to eat the tape if you didn’t keep the heads clean.

But it did run magic eight ball slowly. Very slowly.

And 40+ years on, our modern supercomputers-in-pocket can't do what these early machines could:

Flick 'em on, wait 1 or 2 seconds, enter code & run it.

Pathetic.

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