What was the "killer app" for the Commodore PET?

[cbmeeks]

I know the PET didn't take off like the Apple II, C64, etc. But, being targeted for business, there had to be at least a few titles that were released. I would assume that is.

So, other than BASIC, what were some of the software titles available? About the only thing I can find are some games listed on YouTube.

Is there somewhere I can download some of these programs?

Thanks

[BigEd]

At a guess, the enduring strength of the PET was the IEEE bus, so I'd expect to see it in the lab as much as in the office.

But I see Commodore offered a database program: "OZZ - The Information Wizard", and I see mail-merge and address printing applications too. I see an office suite and VisiCalc here:
http://www.primrosebank.net/computers/p ... ograms.htm

[commodorejohn]

I wasn't around then, but the impression I've gotten from the literature is that the PET was kind of the last wave of the first generation of hobbyist microcomputers - different from the Altair et al in that it was a fixed design rather than a pile of S100 cards in a box, but with solid expandability nonetheless. And back in the first generation, you didn't really buy microcomputers to run specific software packages - you bought them to have a computer, and make it do whatever you wanted. It was the ham-radio culture, not the pop-single culture.

[cbmeeks]

commodorejohn wrote:

And back in the first generation, you didn't really buy microcomputers to run specific software packages - you bought them to have a computer, and make it do whatever you wanted. It was the ham-radio culture, not the pop-single culture.

That's a good analogy.

[whartung]

Yea, the "killer app" of the original Pet was a) that it existed at all, and b) the consumer friendly experience surrounding it.

Simply, and in my case, you had a device that you could toss to a bunch of high school students with little more than a "how de do".

Nothing to wire up, just plug it in, and you get "READY". All of the decisions were made.

With the TRS-80, you had to wire the thing together: the monitor, the CPU/Keyboard, and the cassette tape. The PET was all in one. The Apple, you had to choose a monitor to use, and wire it and the cassette tape up. PET was one stop shopping.

Also, the PET had a very nice graphics set, and a sharp monitor. TRS-80 had the block graphics, and was essentially a repurposed TV. Apple had the hires pixel graphics, but the PET has a very nice monitor, and the extended character set with the line graphics, card suits, as well as reverse video and lower case. It didn't have hires graphics, and using it for block graphics was more challenging than the TRS-80, but for those that were able to look past the simplicity of the form, the character set was a very nice feature.

The PET has full screen editing, and was easy to use. Load from the inbuilt cassette was trivial, and pretty much always worked. We found it really reliable. The folks who kindly donated the machines to our school lab also donated hundreds of blank, short cassette tapes.

So, lacking an actual application need, the PET was a really nice little machine. Reasonably priced too. I think the 8K PET was $799, a little more than the TRS-80, but a lot cheaper than the Apple.

I wrote a bunch of games on ours in high school. I also wrote a grading program for a teacher (even stored the grade data on cassette).

[BigEd]

As home computers, I agree - we didn't need them, but we wanted them.

But there certainly was a desire for computers in businesses - all you had were duplicators and typewriters. Photocopiers if you were lucky.

And likewise for industrial control and labs.

[barrym95838]

whartung wrote:

... The PET has full screen editing, and was easy to use ...

Yeah, but the 80-wide program lines on a 40-column screen caused some frustration for beginners who tried to space to the next line instead of hitting "RETURN". I assisted at a computer camp in the Summer of 1982, and I saw it several times. The program listed perfectly, but wouldn't run, because many of the lines were tacked on to the previous ones. The dirty looks they gave me when I explained that they would have to start over were a bit rough. I know that I could have typed in a short FOR...NEXT loop to POKE the display lines back to 40-wide, then "RETURN" over them line-by-line and screen-by-screen, but apparently that was against the class rules.

Mike B.

[ttlworks]

Back in 1982, we had some CBM3016 at school.

I remember that the teacher had complained about keyboard repairs,
and that a Space bar usually did last a week or so...

He also had complained that the "killer app" seemed to be Space Invaders.


Anyhow, when meeting CBM3016 for the first time, I was very impressed:
to me, it was a big step from a 6 digit 7 segment display (Junior Computer)
to a 40-wide text screen when toying with hexadecimal machine code...

Back then, I just was happy to _have_ a computer... for tinkering with it.
The question "what software will run on it" wasn't that interesting.

[BigEd]

My first reaction to this question was to check out the magazines for adverts, but of course we're talking early years, so we may need early newsletters. There are many here
http://6502.org/documents/publications/
and picking a couple at random:

http://archive.6502.org/publications/mi ... r_1978.pdf
(Very thin pickings for PET - mostly KIM and some Apple II)

http://archive.6502.org/publications/pe ... azette.pdf
(Lots of software advertisers, although of course difficult to see which are the popular ones. In fact, I'm tempted to say that VisiCalc for the Apple II was the first killer app.)

[cbmeeks]

I love thumbing through old computer magazines as well.

I just received in the mail two issues of Compute! magazine dated May and August 1983 (I have even older ones).

It's fun reading the full page ads on word processors that are affordable (even for the PET). I may see if I can find some examples in my magazines too.

[whartung]

barrym95838 wrote:

Yeah, but the 80-wide program lines on a 40-column screen caused some frustration for beginners who tried to space to the next line instead of hitting "RETURN". I assisted at a computer camp in the Summer of 1982, and I saw it several times. The program listed perfectly, but wouldn't run, because many of the lines were tacked on to the previous ones. The dirty looks they gave me when I explained that they would have to start over were a bit rough. I know that I could have typed in a short FOR...NEXT loop to POKE the display lines back to 40-wide, then "RETURN" over them line-by-line and screen-by-screen, but apparently that was against the class rules.

The only problems I recall encountering was that the PET allowed you to enter BASIC keywords in a shorthand, like, maybe P. for print. Or if not that some other shift-sequence. If you used enough of these, you would end up with a line that, when listed, was "too long" to type.

So, if you hit RETURN on that line, it would truncate and ruin the line. Those lines needed to be recoded by hand, using the original shorthand.

Thankfully, those lines were pretty rare in general. But it certainly happened more than once.

[barrym95838]

Yeah, you could shift the second character of the keyword and stop there. So RETURN could be shortened to rE when you were entering the program line. It got a little tricky when there was ambiguity ... (was gO equivalent to GOTO or GOSUB)? PETSCII had some cool attributes, but I could never get around the fact that there were two different PETSCII codes for each member of the upper-case alphabet, depending on what "display mode" you were in.

Mike B.

P.S. The "P." shorthand was an attribute of TRS-80 Level 1 BASIC, which didn't tokenize. If you entered "P." the interpreter would store it as two bytes and look for the first keyword entry that started with "P", which was "PRINT". Entering "PRINT" used five bytes, and made the slow interpreter even slower.

[BigEd]

(On the PET, ? is the abbreviation for print. When listing, it's expanded to PRINT.
http://www.skibo.net/6502/pet2001/
)

[barrym95838]

BigEd wrote:

(On the PET, ? is the abbreviation for print. When listing, it's expanded to PRINT.
http://www.skibo.net/6502/pet2001/
)

That was true for several MS BASIC derivatives, including TRS-80 Level 2 and Applesoft, and it even made it into Atari 8-bit BASIC (unrelated to MS) as its own keyword. I always thought it should have been ! (for "exclaim"), but what do I know ...

Mike B.

[cbmeeks]

barrym95838 wrote:

I always thought it should have been ! (for "exclaim"), but what do I know ...

And - should be for comments (REMarks)

Code: Select all

5 - SIMPLE HELLO WORLD PROGRAM
10 !"HELLO WORLD!"
20 GOTO 10

I like it.