VICE
Emulating the Commodore PET
Les Pounder relives a time when a roguish smuggler who looked a lot like Harrison Ford shot first and your computer was ready to code in seconds!
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Credit: https://vice-emu.sourceforge.io
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Les Pounder is associate editor at Tom’s Hardware and a freelance creative technologist. He blogs about his discoveries at bigl.es.
The Commodore PET has a “quirky” keyboard and it’s sometimes tricky to find the right key.
If you need a little help then there’s a virtual keyboard.
Press F12 and scroll down to the Virtual Keyboard option. Next, press Enter to open the keyboard, select a key and then press Enter.
B ack in 1977 cinema-goers learnt about an ancient order of space wizards and a plucky farm boy who took on an evil Empire with the help of the Force. We also saw a new computer from Commodore, which was hot on the heels of the company’s KIM-1 (a single board computer that looked like a large calculator). The Commodore PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) was announced in 1976, and the team were given just six months to work on the machine so that it would be ready for the 1977 Consumer Electronics Show.
The PET 2001 was an all-in-one machine. Everything including the screen was housed inside the large plastic shell. Cleverly the PET was designed with a nifty means of accessing the hardware. All you had to do was unlock the front of the unit, which hinged upwards – just like the bonnet of a car.
The all-in-one design of the Commodore PET was a hit in North American education. Commodore owned two-thirds of this lucrative market until Apple came in and dominated in the early 1980s. Some 2001 models of PET were relabelled “Teacher’s PET” and were donated to schools. This was a way to sell more units in education and help Commodore with its taxes.
Our first memory of a Commodore PET was in the late 1980s at an event for radio enthusiasts. We saw a Commodore PET being used to run a database of frequencies and stations.
VICE’s main menu is full of useful stuff, such as Drive. Here we can insert virtual disk images and create new disks to save our work.
The iconic look of the Commodore PET range is something you never forget. An all-in-one computer long before Apple!
CREDIT: Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR,
https://commons.wikimedia.
org/wiki/File:Commodore_2001_Series-IMG_0448b.jpg