Commodore History Part 1- The PET 

In fact, he started programming on PET. He also made taxman, a pacman clone on apple 2, got to know about through AVGN in tiger electronics video. He worked at HAL all the way till HAL became Nintendo's second party developer. Edit: I said it was acquired by Nintendo which wasn't the case.

@@PixelTrik I didn't know that Taxman was made by Iwata. Awesome.

RIP

@CP D2191 Maybe not exactly, but I kind of see what you mean.

Iwata was one of the greatest programmers of all time.

Turns out it _is_ something straight out of a classic sci-fi movie. It was in Star Trek!

4K is practically an easy amount of RAM for 1977

Look up the PET prototype, it's possibly even more aesthetically pleasing.

@@Corn0nTheCobb That and the Tektronix 4051 from Battlestar Galactica. Both very cool designs.

K9 of Doctor Who fame too.

2: uhm you didn't have to yell m8 1: YES I DID CUZ U SUCK U A** HOLE

I thought the Commodore was a bird in the early 80s to be honest. Doesn't it sound like a type of bird? Anyone?

2: Wtf is a commodore? 1: IT’S A NAVAL RANK! 2: How tf is a pet related to that? 1: Oh, that commodore. It was an old computer company. 2: 🤦‍♂️

@@drowningin Yes it does

2: You F**king Nerd

huh

What kinda Diselpunk setting did you come from, bro?

@@IncredibleMD ... I'm talking about 1978. Back then, your computer was a mainframe big enough to need its own air conditioned building, which you accessed via a modem over an old fashioned analogue telephone network built into your terminal. Back then, you didn't walk into a shop and walk out with a laptop, you spent a quarter or a million building an air conditioned room, then another quarter of a million on the computer hardware, which was delivered in a large truck and assembled on site. :) Then, there was the terminal. Which didn't have a screen - the output was printed on a big roll of paper. The terminal also had a paper tape reader/writer, which you used to store your program code on reels of stiff paper tape. Frequently, the terminal was heavy enough to be shipped in sections and assembled on site too, because once completely assembled, you needed a fork lift truck to move it. :) This video clip: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-DFMQ1qT_RFM.html Shows you the sort of device in question, though the one I used was a massive Olivetti terminal that looked like the sort of thing Charles Babbage would have cooked up in the 19th century. In fact, I've just found a photo of the very same terminal I used back in 1978: retroscoop.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/ollivetti_article.jpg That beast was nearly 200 pounds in weight, by the way. More on the fun and games this involved can be read here: retroscoop.wordpress.com/tag/olivetti-teletype-terminal/ Then, we got our hands on the Commodore PET. In our case, the upscale versions with floppy disc drives. After a year using the terminal the arrival of the PETs was like Star Trek coming to life to students in 1979. Instead of having to nurture fragile paper tapes, we could store dozens of programs on floppy discs. And, we had ... wow, GRAPHICS to play with. Primitive by modern standards, but you could write some fairly playable games in BASIC on the PETs, and if you bothered to learn assembly language, the world was your oyster on those machines. Indeed, seeing a speed comparison between BASIC and assembly language was the launchpad for a LOT of assembly language developers in my college. :) About that comparison ... what would take a BASIC program five minutes to achieve, would be done in a fraction of a second if you wrote the assembly language version instead. With assembly language, you're working directly with the processor instruction set, and the program runs at blitz speed compared to an interpreted language like BASIC, because there's no interpreter over head - the CPU just executes the instructions as fast as it can read them from memory. You don't notice this overhead so much with a modern laptop, because the CPU is running at 2 GHz, you have two or even four processor cores running your code simultaneously, and three levels of caching to speed things up even more. Plus, the PET used an 8-bit 6502 as its CPU: modern laptops have 64-bit CPUs with massive address buses that in some cases will access 256 gigabytes of RAM, assuming you can afford to pay for that largesse of course. On a modern laptop, even JavaScript in a browser will update the display at 50 frames per second or more. Comparing a 1979 PET to a modern laptop, is like comparing the Bleriot monoplane to an SR-71. History can be a fascinating subject if you study it. :)

Comments like these are literal gold

@@Calilasseia thank you very much for the explanations!

well ddddddaaaammmmm

Wow

Is that why facebook got rid of poking?

So I’m not the only one that already knew that

bro why arent u verified been watching your good videos for a long time really like those easy listening videos dont know if youll ever see this

Well that explains alot lol

how shocking! should i POKE it if it tries to byte?

pet the pet

Really? Because when I fed mine it RAMed into me.

If the PET bytes you, does that mean you got bit 8 times?

^_^

Of course it can, where do you think petskii originally came from, LOL

PET was THE first computer of Satoru Iwata (R.I.P.) CEO of Nintendo.

Those crazy dudes never fail to impress. Just when you think you've seen every hack...

Speccy fans: The commodore 64 cannot do vector graphics properly Norbert Kehrer: Hold my beer

Nora the Antipaladin They are god damn wizards

That's the entire point of it I think. Show off your programming skills and pushing the hardware to its limit. If I recall within recent history we got FMV playback on a 6MHz CPU because of these people.

I was blown away by the demos too.

The Demoscene happens when you forgot to tell the coder that something is not possible on a machine. :)

who pays star trek. EVERYONE PLAY NEO PETS *gasp* i said pet and it it makes no sense

@@funnytree6197 no

That game turned me into a programmer, I saw it on a friends computer, when out and bought one. The BASIC source code was open and I was able to tear into it. 40 years later I still am a software developer.

When Kirk has the PET in the movie, he should have had the 'Star Trek' game displayed on it. Imagine Kirk and Spock playing 'Star Trek' on a PET !

@referral madness I am 63 years old and do mainly c#, I do some PHP on Unix/Linux platforms too. Sometimes I feel like I have been modifying that program fro 40 years :)

hi geekpub

TheGeekPub TRS80 was the first computer my fingers touched in my 8th grade computer intro class.

Me too! I played that lawnmower game!

TheGeekPub youre top commment on all this guys vids

go away

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-_4_LJKTkN3s.html Fifteen minutes in there is a PET hard at work in another Hospital.

Doesn't sound very believable. Power supplies wouldn't all get fried at the same time. Can't believe 19 people believed this story.

Collin Taylor actually if they've been on for a really long time, chances are they won't start back up. I've seen it happen countless times with old pbx systems that used similar power supplies.

Collin can’t believe 1 person liked your reply

Me too! Like if u like Orville lol

I stopped to read it as well

Me too, and I do it every frickin time I catch a video that has a bunch of text on the screen that doesn't get narrated line by line, lol. I'll actually skip back to the very moment the text appears on-screen, and if i don't do this, my brain starts to flip out. I'll lose sleep over it if i don't. Perhaps I should have a chat with a specialist about this.....

shakespear! y the way

Yep, Commodore were a big part of the reason ppl could afford to have a computer in the house.

Worked for our household, when my older brother saved up to get his Commodore 128, I got his VIC-20 as a hand me down.

+Kurt Angerdinger Commodore *is* his thing. Pretty much the first computer he owned was Commodore. While you are factually correct that the PET was the first of the three to be shown at CES, I still want to point out that the Apple was first *demonstrated* and *went on sale* in July 1976, six months *before* CES, with the first 175 being sold within 9 or 10 months. The Apple II was introduced in April 1977; the PET's official release date was SIX MONTHS LATER, in October 1977. Even Wikipedia lists the PET, TRS-80, and Apple as the "1977 Trinity" (they don't use the words "big three"). Out of those, the PET was actually the *least* successful, selling around 1 million units, compared to 1.5 million TRS-80 Model I's and (eventually) 4 million Apple II's. Keep in mind that I'm talking the number of units sold before the product line was cancelled, not the "total number of units sold by 1981" or whatever. I couldn't find any reference for the Apple II having a "faulty disk controller" (though it wouldn't surprise me). Also, I think you misunderstood the "bad video hardware": Only pixels with an even-numbered X coordinate could be violet or blue, and only pixels with an odd-numbered X coordinate could be green or orange. But black and white can be drawn on *any* pixel.

Apple been lying about its importance since 1977, basically.

back in the late 70s, my family had a typewriter, and when my school switched to PETs in the writing lab I did in fact go insane because of the keyboard.

3000: The Quantum Guy

4000: The 4K guy

2130: The 128-Bit Guy

5000: The 8K Guy.

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999979865403129999999999999798654031299999999999997986540312 bit guy

Lol

I don't know if you knew this already, but he already showed in another video how Bender uses the 6502. It was in the video titled "The basics of BASIC, the programming language of the 1980s. " at 1:32 in.

I always thought the same thing!

Me too, but it took me a while. At beginning I was like "yeah, funny. Like in those old TV shows..." Now I love it😊

Yeah, that demo is truly amazing - you wouldn't know that it doesn't have any graphics modes from watching that demo.

I don't know details on how PET worked, but I guess it's simply a combination of three things: - synching with the video chip, by either asking it for an interrupt or monitoring its internal registers - knowing how many machine cycles are per scanline (probably similar to C64, which had 63-65, depending on model) - changing an appropriate register in the video chip at the appropriate moment during the scanline, similar to CGA low-res mode, used in the 8088 MPH demo for PC

Anders Enger Jensen I'm here for the music

I was an IBM PC person too when I was younger. (and I guess I technically still am), but wow is it ever a contrived architecture to do graphics on. Sure, the modern iterations are OK, but the older ones have some serious issues with their expansion bus and the implications it has for graphics. the ISA bus is terrifyingly slow if you have to do even EGA quality graphics...

KuraIthys Yeah, exactly. But then again, at the time I had no real knowledge about the limitations of the ISA bus and such, other than 16-bit had to be better than 8-bit and I knew how the IRQ and BASE addresses worked. For me, it kinda worked like a charm, after figuring out how to get both my Roland MPU-IPC-T and Sound Blaster Pro to work.

It's only 20min, how many times are you going to watch it? :)

TI tried computers and failed, calculators were all they had left.

texas instruments managed to make a gaming calculator

Only because the US Government support their monopoly in schools

That wave demo especially blew me away. So simple, but seems impossible on a machine that can only display characters.

Booooooooring

Same. I own (and use!) an Amiga 500 now - two years and counting. The experience is part magical, part frustrating, part natural. If I was left with just that Amiga setup working, I would pretty much be able to do what I'm doing on any modern computer - minus surfing the internet (I'd also need a compatible printer).

@@Leofwine Well, accessing the internet is everything these days. ;-) I think you'd be significantly better-positioned if you had at least an Amiga 1200, but to each his own.

No

Yes

@@nyccollin What the fuck are you talking about?

@@gopnikaward3986 I know what the mandela effect is, and I think it's bullshit, but he commented something that had absolutely nothing to do with anything here and that profile image is a meme from about 10 years ago...

A single board computer popular with hobbyists and engineers - yep, sounds about right

No biggie, the Killer POKE wouldn't affect that PET.

I like memes, so no one cares, lol.

@@WildDiamond07 yes, no one gives a shit about you liking memes.

I know. Not even me or my soul.

The first computer That I ever _programmed_ was a LEGO Mindstorms NXT

Same, sparked a 25-year IT career off that little feller. The 8K one with the external cassette drive. Built like a bunker, two toddlers could climb all over the thing and not hurt it. Funny route I took - I was a printer at a shop - DesCalso Lithograph - where we did the bindery work for InfoWorld in 1979 in San Francisco. I would take a copy home and read it - "woa, I could own a computer, cool!". My coworkers thought I was nuts. Bought it from a guy who had started a laundromat then opened a computer store. Added a 300 baud acoustic coupler modem, quit my union job, took a COBOL class, bought a suit, puffed up a resume, and started pounding the pavement downtown. Literally - had to resole my shoes twice in a year. Took about 5-6 months, as savings dwindled, got a good entry-level offer just in time. I remember being annoyed that Commodore didn't let you PEEK into high memory so you couldn't view their OS code from BASIC. So I wrote a machine code program to disassemble the whole OS - then wrote a COBOL program to cross-reference the JMP and JSR vectors. Satisfied, put the whole bundle away. Might still be in a box somewhere, I have no idea where, though. Jack Tramiel was ruthless - he had a simple motto "business is war." He had a big role in torpedoing TI's foray into the market, if I remember right. The board of directors eventually forced him out due his nepotism practices. Around that time, Warner Bros. was trying to unload a failing Atari after they bought it from Nolan Bushnell and mismanaged it into the ground. Tramiel basically got them to pay him to take the company off their hands. Then, when he discovered the balance sheet was overstated, he went back and shook them down for millions more. Legendary guy.

Except for the CRT noise in this video aaaaaaaaaaaghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

That can't be helped. Watching on my android tablet, I can't hear it anyway as the tiny speakers can't produce that high frequency.

8-Bit Guy is GOAT

It's just you

footrotdog, yes, and Jack Tramiel gave Chuck Peddle only months to design and produce the PET so that it could be presented at a trade show. I am certain that they knew what a computer keyboard should look like, but they ran out of time, and with the size constraints caused by fitting in a tape drive, the keyboard had to be small, at least initially. AND, Commodore was vertically integrated, so they were set up to make all parts of the PET in house, from ICs to the case. I am sure that their calculator group was tasked with hacking up a small keyboard, just as their office furniture group was tasked with designing and making the sheet metal case.

A calculator company plus a semiconductor company. They just used what was available and therefore expedient. Ironically, Jack Tramiel started his career repairing typewriters. 😄

Я не знаю что он сказал

Love me a good world processor...

viva les geeks

Me

/r/copypasta

Nice speech.

I destroyed the contents of dynamic memory. They're just ignorant. This was like, 1983, teachers and principal didn't understand computing. I was about 7 years old; if they actually understood what I did, it would have been a completely different outcome. But fast forward ~15 years, some 13yo indian kid makes a _very_ simple HTML page and he makes the fucking news as a genius. At 13 I was already coding in assembly language, and he needed MARKUP.

@@officermeowmeowfuzzyface4408 Same here man. Started with BASIC at 9 (1984), I was programming in assembler at 11 (1986). Set up the computer lab in my middle school because the teachers had no idea what they were doing (1987). Actually taught a computer class in high school because I knew more than the teacher did, she was little more than just a figure head. Made for an easy elective though.

I started with QBasic at 10 and shortly after, I was programming in Visual Basic .Net. I barely touched assembly, though. That small touch was a little bit of 65c816(6502 based processor) ASM to hack Super Mario World, but only a very little bit.

I am 13 and I'm still learning c++!

Let me tell you something. Nothing has changed, faculty still can't/don't want to understand basic computing...

The very same. TV shows have taught me to read everything on the screen for lil easter eggs.

yup, same here... obviously I have no life

same

*Shakespeare

Fancy Teeth same

@John Ross I have an original late seventies PET flyer and can confirm it is Transactor. At least in the UK.

@referral madness Transactor means something that undertakes "Transactions". A transaction is a business term for buying and selling, an agreement between two parties which is then enacted. I think Terminal would have possibly made better sense but maybe it was avoided because there were already (dumb) terminals in the computer world and Commodore maybe didn't want their machine confused with one of these. The word transactor may have been more attractive to the business community of the day.

I'll probably finish it up with the A1000 and 500.. unfortunately I don't have a 2000 to show.

Oh, what about a A1200? A superb machine. I used to own one up to 94. :(

Yeah, I had an Amiga 500, 1000, 1200, and 600 at one time. I even had highly modded A500 at one point too. Those things were very impressive beasts and beat the pants off of any PC when they came out. Too bad Commodore's marketing at that time was god awful. They could have been the new standard easily.

The first and foremost competitor for Amiga wasn't PC, but Macintosh (there was also Atari ST, but it was less popular than those two). They were both 68k systems, they were controlled by single companies, they focused on providing superior graphical and sound experience compared to PCs. They were go-to choices for people doing more "artsy" stuff, like publishing, graphics, video editing, music etc. Furthermore, both Apple and Commodore weren't doing well in the early 90s, Commodore didn't survive, Apple did and now they're doing better than ever. Imagine holy wars between Android and amigaPhone.

It isn't surprising that the Atari ST was less popular. It certainly didn't help Atari's case that the original version of BASIC that shipped with the ST was so buggy. For example, try typing X=18.9. On an Atari ST running ST Basic, you get this: function not yet done System error #%N, please restart And other commands like X=39.8 or X=4.725 would crash the computer! When MetaComCo announced they were "one bug away" from releasing a new version, industry wags jokingly wondered "whether Atari has only one more bug to eliminate from ST BASIC or one more to add". So, like I said, a buggy implementation of BASIC certainly did not help the ST's reputation. And +sprybug is correct: What really killed the Amiga was Commodore's marketing. For example, the only magazine that they advertised the Amiga in was Commodore Magazine (their in-house magazine), *which they cancelled* on the grounds that "we're a computer company, not a magazine company". The only television advertisements for the Amiga that I ever saw were made by a local firm named VidCom (who was also the only Amiga retailer within 80 kilometers.)

I was about to type that as well. It looks to me like the keyboard was inspired by a calculator button layout, which of course isn't surprising considering Commodore was already a calculator company.

Yes, it seems like an adapted calculator layout for typing alphabetic characters plus others. The first thing I noted that was odd was the pi symbol on one of the "function" keys. I think IBM had a standardized layout for their terminal keyboards at that time.

Custom desktops PCs have style.

You really don't want the keyboard to be built into the pc case like the PETs and other old computers were. Computers are full of fans / HDDs now and the constant vibration and noise would be shitty

Lars Bolduc maybe 1 in a hundreds. Most Look like a Transformer Designer by a 12 year old

fucking ugly imacs , i hate them

so... big beige cube is the epitome of style?

+Caffeine Addict: I spent my childhood in the 70s (and early 80's, which was even worse...:), and yes, early home computers were dope as hell ;-)

I'm from the '70s ('4 to be exact). My first experience with a computer was when I was in kindergarten ('79), when the PET was already 2 years old.

I was already in high school when the PET came out, although didn't have a home computer until the Tandy 1000A. My computer at school was a DEC PDP-11/20.

18:37