Commodore PET – The Worlds First Personal Computer

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

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

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.

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.

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