Chuck Peddle built the first personal computer in three days, just hours before CES opened
Commodore PET – The Worlds First Personal Computer
The Commodore PET, first shown at CES in January 1977, beat the Apple II and TRS-80 to become the world's first personal computer. Engineer Chuck Peddle assembled the prototype in a wooden case with a $90 TV tube, working 20-hour days until a few hours before the show. It shipped with a keyboard, monitor, cassette drive, and 4K of RAM for $495, and Commodore sold only 500 units in its first year.
The world's first Personal Computer was not ready even a week before the show and in the three days leading up to CES, Chuck worked 20 hours a day getting the PET prototype functional; he completed this now historic task only a few hours before the doors opened.
- buildsjets
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.
- JdeBP
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.
- timbit42
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.
- jdswain
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.
- JKCalhoun
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.