7 Jul
1998
7 Jul
'98
6:21 a.m.
On Jul 7, 6:29, Doug Spence wrote:
machine
On Mon, 6 Jul 1998, Olminkhof wrote:
9". All the ones I've seen were 9".
8" screen
Or is it 9"? I can't check mine because they are both locked in my
father's bedroom at this hour. Supposedly the 2001N and 2001B came with 12"
screens, but I've never seen
one.
I'm looking at an old copy (don't have a recent one on file) of Jim
Brain's "Canonical List of Commodore Products" and notice that one of my
PETs doesn't match any model on the list. From this list:
PET 2001-4K 4kB, Chiclet Keys, Built-In Cassette, Black Trim.
PET 2001-8K 8kB, Chiclet Keys, Built-In Cassette, Blue Trim, 9" screen
PET 2001-16K 16kB, Chiclet Keys, Built-In Cassette, Blue Trim, 9" screen
PET 2001-32K 32kB, Chiclet Keys, Built-In Cassette, Blue Trim, 9" screen
PET 2001B-8 8kB, Business Style, no Graphics on Keys, 12" screen
PET 2001B-16 16kB, Business Style, no Graphics on Keys, 12" screen
PET 2001B-32 32kB, Business Style, no Graphics on Keys, 12" screen
PET 2001N-8 8kB, Home Computer, Graphics on Keys, 12" screen, Num. Keys
PET 2001N-16 16kB, Home Computer, Graphics on Keys, 12" screen, Num.
Keys
PET 2001N-32 32kB, Home Computer, Graphics on Keys,
BASIC 4.0, Num.
Keys.
PET 2001NT Teacher's PET. Same as 2001N, just
rebadged
Mine is just labeled "PET 2001-8K" I think,
with no 'N' or 'B' anywhere,
but mine has a 9" screen and a full-size keyboard with graphics symbols.
I don't think Jim's list is quite correct. For a start, there were lots of
2001 PETs with 9" screen and the graphics keyboard, without the
cassette-beside-the-keyboard. I've got one here. And the /B and /N series
were called 3000's not 2001 everywhere except the USA. The 12" versions
didn't appear in the UK until later. According to my (USA) manual, the
2001/B (aka 3000 here) was a 9" screen too. IIRC, the 4000 was the first
with a 12" screen, at least in the UK (USA might easily be different, of
course), and that's borne out by my manuals. The 12" screen version was
eventually called the 8000 series here, and had different firmware (and up
to 96K RAM I think, bank-switched).
One of the differences between the business and home versions (apart from
graphics symbols on the keytops) was whether the machine powered up in
upper- or lower-case.
Note that at least the early PET 2001 machines came
with a white display.
I think some of the 'newer' ones came with green phosphor instead.(?)
My 2001-8K is white phosphor. The full-size-keyboard ones were green.
tape drive
built in, to the left of the keyboard
Keyboard dependent.
But there's a lot more to 'features' than outward appearance. The
uses a 1.0MHz 6502. It has an 80-pin memory expansion
port on the right
side (the 40 pins on the top side are all ground). There's an external
cassette interface at the back, for TAPE #2.
On the later models, that's TAPE#1 and the TAPE#2 is an internal connector.
There's an IEEE-488
interface on the back that was used for printers, disk drives, modems,
and
probably other stuff. There's a user port on the
back which is similar
to
the user port on the VIC-20/C64.
The original ROMs don't have a monitor or support a disk drive, but
ugrade
ROMs (which I think came out in 1979?) fix both of
those things.
Well, they do, sort-of, but a bug in the IEEE routines prevents it from
working with anything other than a printer. There were a few other bugs
as well, and the upgrade ROMs themselves were replaced later.
(As an aside, original ROM machines start up with
the message:
*** COMMODORE BASIC ***
whereas upgrade ROM machines start up with
### COMMODORE BASIC ###
I don't have a machine with BASIC 4.0, so I don't know how that starts
up. Upgrade ROM machines also have a Microsoft easter egg in them
whcih is missing from the original ROMs.)
There was a very-short-lived BASIC-2, and BASIC-3 (more-or-less the upgrade
ROM set) was around for a while before 4. 4 has extra commands for the
disk, instead of having to use the generic IEEE channel commands, but
otherwise it's almost the same as 3.
Only the original ROMs start up with ***; all of the later ones used ###.
It might also be important to mention that the PET has
a timer that
operates in real time. And it has the same character set(s) as the
VIC-20
and C64, but you can't switch between the
upper/lower-case text character
set and the upper-case/graphics set without issuing a POKE command. (Was
it 49512,12 and 49512,14? My memory is rusty.)
All those POKEs are ROM-version-dependent.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York