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.

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.

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.

Don't be so sure about it being "The Worlds First Personal Computer": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_1

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.

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.

Way back in the 70s a PET was the platform for my first paying programming job. Given an equation for a transformer hysteresis curve with a couple of parameters, I was tasked to plot hysteresis curves graphically.

For maximum info-density and maximum aesthetics, I got deeply into the character set for block graphics, so that every position in the plot had the character that best fit the curves and made them as smooth and cool and informative as possible.

It was a great introduction to the craft.

Commodore people love to claim "first" for the PET because it was announced in January 1977, but they didn't ship until much later, like in October or later

So if you actually wanted an 8-bit computer in the Summer of 1977 you would have been stuck getting an Apple II which you could actually purchase

I had a friend who had the original PET with the small keyboard. Then when I started in the military in 1980 we had a course in basic computers and how to use then. One of these was a board with a hex display, where I managed to get it to display my name in the display.

But one day we were going to a 'real' computer lab, that was basically a room full of PET computers.

As I knew we were going back some days later, I quickly loaned a couple of cassette tapes from my friend, and the session became a bit more enjoyable, as we could play a lot of games now.

However, this was the version with the 'real' keyboard, which also meant that it had a newer ROM. So some of the old games didn't work on this version of the PET.

Nitpick: In Europe we used 220 Volts - not 220 Watts.

Semi-related: I was surprised to learn Commodore is not dead. After a hundred different bankruptcies and court cases, somebody managed to put together all trademark rights in 2025 and is now selling the 64 and they announced a flip phone, of all things, this year.

The Kenebak 1 is the first according to the Computer History Museum

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/personal-computer...

And 40+ years on, our modern supercomputers-in-pocket can't do what these early machines could:

Flick 'em on, wait 1 or 2 seconds, enter code & run it.

Pathetic.

A friend of mine gave me one of those back in the 90s. We named it, Ora Boris and programed it to be a magic eight ball. Decided to live up to its name and ate the tape that it was stored itself on (we forgot to clean the heads).

And yes, I realize Ora Boris is misspelled, iPhone voice transcription just cannot handle that one.

I owned one of those for a while. Was given to me by a friend back in the early 90s.

Aside from a huge power under the hood, ha ha ha, it also had heft. You could definitely stun a cow with that thing.

And power? We named it ouraborus and programed it to be a magic eight ball. However, sadly, it decided to live up to its name, and consumed the cassette tape that it was stored on. Those tape machines out of tenancy to eat the tape if you didn’t keep the heads clean.

But it did run magic eight ball slowly. Very slowly.