SpuffMonkey Posted September 7, 2015 Posted September 7, 2015 Went out this afternoon to a pine furniture shop round the corner from where I live - its closing down and thought I might get a bargain. The wife picked out a cheap mirror, and when we went to pay, the bloke was doing his stock inventory on a Commodore Pet! Hadn't seen one in years - he said he'd bought it when he started the business and never saw the point in changing it. Impressively reliable as I guess there isn't anyone repairing them these days - I nearly offered to buy it.
elsiegee40 Posted September 8, 2015 Posted September 8, 2015 Blimey. That is a blast from the past. My Dad used to bring one home from work to use in the 1970s. I remember the C15 cassettes for data storage... or was this a newer one with floppy disks?
unixman_again Posted September 8, 2015 Posted September 8, 2015 Little known fact about the Commodore Pet - when it was first released, it was reviewed in Playboy. I think it might have been the first computer the magazine featured.
SpuffMonkey Posted September 8, 2015 Author Posted September 8, 2015 It had CBM on the front and a number (can't remember what) - I was so surprised at seeing it, I didn't really take in any details - was the floppy integrated? I don't recall a separate box. A blast from the past - wasted many hours playing Space Invaders on one of them in about 1980!
howartp Posted September 9, 2015 Posted September 9, 2015 My C64 had a separate floppy drive, but it's the only Commodore I knew of; not old enough for any of the others. Dad bought the floppy drive and Thomas the Tank (on floppy) for Christmas one year. :-)
unixman_again Posted September 9, 2015 Posted September 9, 2015 The floppy drive on the C64 had part number 1541. The instruction manual contained an instruction not to insert or remove a disk when the green light was on. The green light was the power indicator; it should have said red light, which was the activity indicator. Are there still people sitting in front of their 1541, floppy in hand, waiting for the green light to go out? The Commodore Datasette (1530) was used on the PET, C64 and the VIC20. The most interesting thing that I know about them is that each data block was recorded twice. When the tape was read, the blocks read had their check sums calculated, and if they matched, a byte by byte comparison was performed and if these matched, they block was passed. I hacked mine so each block was only written once; this gave me blistering fast data transfer - twice as fast as everyone else!
Garacesh Posted September 9, 2015 Posted September 9, 2015 Little known fact about the Commodore Pet - when it was first released, it was reviewed in Playboy. I think it might have been the first computer the magazine featured. In all fairness, I hear that particular gentleman's literature used to actually do a lot of discussion pieces. It wasn't just noodie ladies. Apparently there were significantly less when it started. I say apparently because I wasn't around in those times
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