Commodore PET 2001

The PET was introduced in June 1977 and it cost about DM 2500,- in Germany. Of course it was not the first personal computer how it is often called. If you define "personal computer" as a computer which is not located in a data center and there maintained by a team of specialists (operators, maintainers) and whose cost/performance-ratio is that cheap, that in principle it could be dedicated to a single user and not to a whole band of programmers and users, then there were many personal computers before, for example the HP5100, the HP9100, the various Wang computers, the PDP8 in all its variants, the LGP 30 just to name some of them. The PET is legally entitled to be one of the first complete computers, which were that cheap, that it was also afforable for private people who were not willig to tinker.

Equipped with a 9" monitor, which still is in the museum in an older version, that still has a white glowing phosphorous. The keyboard is the famous calculator keyboard which is noted for its bad contact making and its little unergonomic keys. Anyhow it left space for a built-in cassette recorder.

The processor is a 1 MHz 6502, the RAM has a size of 8K. The ROM is 14KB where an 8K-BASIC-Interpreter by an American company is located, which is not able to provide bug-free sofware 'till the very day. Precise: It is about a so-called 'Old-ROM-Pet', which has still different bugs in its BASIC. For example, the legal statement

    10 IF F OR I = 5 GOTO 200

generates a synatx error, becaus the parts 'F OR' are wrongly interpreted as 'FOR'.