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really?

Posted by tesla (A) on November 21, 2014 at 11:09:34

In Reply to: RE: Can We Get Past 1982, Please?! posted by Ed Sawyer on November 21, 2014 at 08:30:53:

Ok, in the US, the Apple II, (with the upcoming cult of Apple and Steve Jobs) was the computer that was taken most seriously by the business crowd, (in the US, pre the IBM PC/Microsoft taking over the market), but the Commodore 64 was/is the best selling computer model of all time.

BTW, the previous Commodore business computer line, (unfortunately named Pet") were arguably superior to the Apple II line, at least hardware-wise. They also sold a lot of Pets to schools back then, both in the US and Canada.

How about dual 5 1/4 floppy disk drives with up to 1 meg per disk? 5 and 7.5 hard disks? built-in monitors with up to 80 columns? The top of the line Superpet business computer was the first computer to have a dual processor system.

SuperPET 9000 series

CPU: MOS 6502 and Motorola 6809, 1 MHz
RAM: 96 kB
ROM: 48 kB, including BASIC 4.0 and other programming languages (Waterloo MicroAPL, MicroFORTRAN, MicroBASIC, MicroPascal, MicroCOBOL)
Video: MOS 6545, 12" monochrome monitor, 80×25 character display
Sound: single piezo "beeper" (optional external speaker driven by MOS 6522 CB2 pin)
Ports: MOS 6520 PIA, MOS 6522 VIA, MOS 6551 ACIA, 1 RS-232, 2 Datassette ports (1 on the back), 1 IEEE-488 port for connecting peripherals.
Notes: basically an 8000 with ROMs for programming languages, it also had three character sets, and an RS-232 for use as a terminal

peripherals

Commodore Business Machines made a variety of disk drives available for the PET, using the IEEE 488 interface, including:

Commodore 2031 single disk drive (170 kB single-sided 5.25" format)
Commodore 4040 dual disk drive (same disk format as the 2031) could be used as a stand-alone disk copier.
Commodore 8024 132 column printer, friction or traction gear, Mannesmann Tally mechanics
Commodore 8050 dual disk drive (500 kB single-sided 5.25" format)
Commodore 8075 plotter, Watanabe mechanics
Commodore 8250 "quad density" dual disk drive (1 MB capacity, same as the 8050, but double-sided)
Commodore 8280 dual disk drive (8") (500 kB MFM format)
Commodore 9060 hard drive (5 MB)
Commodore 9090 hard drive (7.5 MB)
Commodore SFD-1001 "quad density" single disk drive (basically a single-drive 8250 model)

Basically, Commodore computers were much more popular than any other computer back in the eighties in Europe and Canada.

For more information about the early Commodore Pets, see this. BTW, Rockwell used Pets in those years, I'm sure it didn't hurt that the Pet line used the Hewlett Packard GPIB bus for connecting things like drives
and printers.

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• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_PET   (Open in New Window)

Edits: 11/21/14

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