Commodore PET 2001

Commodore's first serious attempt at a personal computer arrived with a keyboard its own customers couldn't stop complaining about, and a name retrofitted from a dictionary search.

The Commodore PET 2001, manufactured by Commodore Business Machines,¹ carries a name that was engineered backwards. According to the lore preserved in the documentation, a Commodore executive named Chuck went home, scanned through the dictionary, and returned the next day to announce the machine would be called the personal electronic transactor. The acronym "PET" had been chosen first for its warmth and approachability, with the backronym assembled to fit.⁴ The number 2001, by contrast, needed no dictionary: the documentation notes plainly that it evoked space-age futurism, trading on an association that was still culturally alive at the time of launch.⁴ The trademark on both the name and the number was held by Commodore Business Machines.¹⁹

The machine ran PET BASIC,¹⁹ specifically identified in contemporary documentation as the 3.0 BASIC,¹¹ and in at least one source as Microsoft PET BASIC with 6502 machine-language subroutine.¹⁶ The processor itself is not identified in the surviving documentation reviewed here. Display resolution, sound, and I/O port specifications are similarly absent from the record.

The Keyboard Problem

The original PET 2001 shipped with a calculator-style keyboard.⁴ The complaints were, by Commodore's own account, endless.⁴ The company's response was the PET 2001-N and PET 2001-B, both released in 1978 at prices from £795, both equipped with a full-size keyboard.⁴ The integrated cassette drive that had shipped in the original was dropped on these models; an external cassette became optional.⁴

The keyboard split between the -N and -B variants was more than cosmetic. PET keyboards were described in the trade press as graphics keyboards because, beyond letters and numbers on the key tops, graphics characters appeared on the key fronts.¹¹ The number keys occupied a separate pad to the right, alongside cursor movement keys and the period.¹¹ Characters common in BASIC entry (: ? $ % #) could be typed without shifting; capital letters and numbers also required no shift, while the shift key itself produced graphics characters.¹¹ The 2001-N carried these graphical PETSCII characters; the business-focused 2001-B had standard characters only and no graphic keys.⁴⁵

Models & Prices

The 2001 line covered a range of memory configurations. Prices below are drawn from 1979 trade publications and should be read as the going rate at that moment, not as launch or final prices.

The gap between advertised RAM and net usable RAM is worth noting plainly: the 8K model delivered 7,167 bytes to the user,⁵ the 16K models 15,359,⁵ and the 32K models 31,743.⁵ BASIC's overhead was real and measurable.

One graphics mode was accessible by the unglamorous method of typing POKE 59468,12.⁴ No further detail on display capabilities appears in the available documentation.

Where It Sat in the Commodore Line

By 1980, Commodore was running three distinct computer lines simultaneously: the PET 2001 series, the CBM 2001 series, and the CBM 8000 series.¹¹ The principal difference between the PET 2001 and CBM 2001 lines was in the keyboards.¹¹ The positioning was explicit: the PET 2001 was oriented toward education, not business.¹⁵

Software support included Commodore Word Pro II and Word Pro III, both listed for the original PET 2001-8,¹³ and at least one third-party product required a retrofit kit for operation with the 2001-8.³ Upgrade kits appear in the record as chip-only options (TK160N) for the 8N/8B, 16N/16B, and 32N/32B variants, and as chip-plus-interface-PCB options (TK80P, TK160P) for the 2001-8.¹³

A 1982 issue of BYTE noted that the PET 2001 had not been in production for approximately two years at that point.¹⁵ The exact discontinuation date does not appear in the surviving documentation. What the record does confirm is that the machine lasted long enough to accumulate a software ecosystem, a product family, two keyboard generations, and a naming story that says something honest about how personal computing got sold in its early years: pick the feeling first, then find words to match it.

References

1. 1979 08 BYTE 04-08 LISP (1979)
2. BYTE Vol 04-08 1979-08 Lisp (1979)
3. micro 14 jul 1979[ocr] (1979)
4. Computers that made Britain v1
5. micro 12 may 1979[ocr] (1979)
6. MICRO Vol12-5 79
7. micro 13 jun 1979[ocr] (1979)
8. MICRO Vol13-6 79
9. 1978 11 BYTE 03-11 The Sky is the Limit (1978)
10. micro 16 sep 1979[ocr] (1979)
11. micro 30 nov 1980[ocr] (1980)
12. micro 25 jun 1980[ocr] (1980)
13. 1982 08 BYTE 07-08 Logo (1982)
14. MICRO Vol18-11 79