Commodore PET

The Commodore PET was a huge computer which looked so space-aged that Star Trek in the 1960s would of been proud of it. The Commodore PET stood for the letters Personal Electronic Transactor.

Remarkably the Commodore PET still has a thriving on-line community. From it’s launch in 1977 of the first PET model called the 2001 made huge waves in the business world.

The Commodore PET from 1977

The monochrome screen and limited font package meant loads of imagination was needed for anything to takr place that was worth using it for.

Weren’t a lot of them a green screen? I can’t remember whether they were just a green transfer added onto the screen to save your retina or whether it was truly a green screen on the PET.

The Commodore PET could display certain characters so most of the games consisted of guiding an asterisk around a line maze with the capital M as a monster.

A friend of mine who was really into programming it, showed me the only game that ever impressed me – Pacman. The Pacman version on it was actually very playable, though it looked particularly pixelly and poor compared to the arcade version at the time.

This was one of my first brushes with a  new personal computer  and the PC market was literally about to explode.

What memories did you have of the Commodore PET by  Commodore Business Machines?