Introducing myself - Commodore PET

In late 1977, I began to hear about small computers that could fit on a tabletop. My grandfather, who was a very generous man, used to take me on Saturdays to various places, such as shopping, to the airport to watch the planes, etc. and one day I suggested we might go check out a new ?computer store? that had opened in Windsor Locks, CT (about 20 miles from my home). We went there several times, and marveled over the computers they had for sale (I believe they initially had Altair computers, and eventually started selling the Apple II). The Apple II seemed quite interesting, but was also quite expensive (for a 14-year old). Somehow we heard that a local store (called NEECO, which stood for New England Electronics Company, and primarily sold calculators) would soon be getting a new ?computer? in that was made by Commodore. Each week or so I?d stop in and see if they had it yet, and each week the answer was ?not yet, we?re still waiting?. Finally, they got one, and they gave me a demo of it. I couldn?t believe how compact the whole thing was, with the built-in monitor, keyboard and cassette drive. And it had a BASIC programming language that I liked. Yes, the Apple II also had BASIC (only Integer basic at that time, I suppose) and one of the main reasons I really felt at home with the PET is because the prompt it gave was ?READY?, which was like the RSTS/E prompt ?Ready? which I was familiar with. It sounds crazy, but that one little word gave me a warm feeling about the PET and made it so that I could identify with something I already knew. The Apple II ?>? prompt seemed very foreign to me. I spent many Saurdays down at NEECO talking with the others who came to marvel at the PET. The owners of the store were very generous in allowing us to congregate there, and chat about computers in general. I guess it was sort-of like a computer club, but we never formalized it as such. May of 1978 came. My grandfather came one Saturday, and I planned to go on our usual trip to NEECO. But, my grandfather opened the trunk, and out came my 15th birthday present, an 8K PET 2001 of my very own. One of the things I really liked about having a PET was that it was MY computer. I didn?t have to listen to some privileged system manager tell me what I could or couldn?t do. If I wanted to try something that might crash or lock up the computer, that was just fine. I felt in control of the system. NEECO did very well selling the PET computer. I believe they were one of the main sellers in New England, as they had a printed catalog which they mailed out, showing the systems, and software they had for sale. I don?t know for sure, but I think they did a fair amount of mail order business. Some of the people who spent their Saturdays at NEECO started writing software that went into the NEECO catalog, and the author would get a commission on every copy sold. One such program I fondly remember was Hal Wadleigh?s ?WAR GAMES? package, which had 4 games; one was an anti-aircraft firing game, one was a depth charge game, and I don?t remember the other two. These were interactive games which made good use of the PET graphics and I was awed by how someone could write a program in BASIC to make these games work. My dad and I wrote a game we called ?Masterbrain?, which was basically the game Mastermind. We put that in the catalog for sale. I wrote a shooter game I called ?Star Wars?, where fighter ships would come into your screen, and you?d have to align the gun onto them and fire. I was only 15, and I was very na?ve about things like name copyrights and trademarks. I probably made a couple hundred dollars total on commissions for the Star Wars game, but for a 15-year old in 1978, that seemed like an awful lot. One of the guys who spent some time on Saturdays at NEECO was Ted Scott. He was not only a good software developer, but he was also an electrical engineer and knew a lot about the hardware side of things. He developed a device for the PET which he called the ?Music Box?. It connected to one of the external ports, and had a speaker, and special software. One of the programs actually displayed music on a staff and played it on the Music Box. It was only one note at a time (monophonic) but this was quite a while before people starting using the ?CB2 line? (I think that?s what it was called) for sounds. The main difference between the Music Box and the later CB2 approach was that by poking a memory location, you?d only get a ?Click? out of the speaker, and you had to write timing loops to get different pitches. The CB2 approach used the 6522?s internal registers to determine what frequency to generate ? just set the frequency, and turn it ?on?, and then back ?off? when you wanted the sound to stop. One of the things the PET allowed me to do was go beyond BASIC programming. I started to learn about things like 6502 assembly language, and direct screen writing by store data into ?screen memory?. I did a little hacking with the Music Box to figure out what made it work. I then started writing my own 6502 routines which made sound effects from the speaker of the Music Box. I incorporated some of these sound effects into a newer version of my ?Star Wars? game and advertised it as supporting the Music Box for sound. As I recall, I don?t think I ever asked Ted Scott for permission to do this ? I just did it. But, I didn?t use any of his code ? just used the hardware if it was there ? so I may have sold some Music Box units for him. I wrote an awful lot of other programs for the PET. Many of them were just tinkerings, but they helped teach me many concepts about programming and computers. I got very interested in writing 6502 routines that could be called from a BASIC program, to do things faster than BASIC could do. I didn?t have a 6502 assembler that I liked ? the only one I had was tape based, and very cumbersome to use. So I learned to hand-assemble 6502. At one point, I had a good portion of the instruction set memorized. I could disassemble 6502 instructions in my head, and have a good idea of what a routine might do just by looking at the hex opcodes. One of the things the PET did not support was ?blinking? text on the screen, yet it had normal, and reverse letters. One of my neatest routines I wrote (in my mind, anyway) was a routine that would create blinking text. There was an area in memory where you?d POKE in the start row/col and length of the text you wanted to blink, then activate the routine, and it would cause that area to blink steadily (?in the background?). The routine hooked itself into the video interlace interrupt on the PET. You could change the flashing areas simply by POKEing new values into memory. One of the other programs that I wrote and sold through NEECO?s catalog was a word game called ?PROBE?. The basic idea was that each player (the human and the computer) would pick a word, and then try to guess the other player?s word. I entered a whole bunch of words from the dictionary for the computer to use, and also did some analysis on these words to give the computer some smarts when making guesses. For example, if the opponent had a ?T? showing with nothing before it, the computer knew what the most likely letter to precede ?T? is, and it would guess that. If that failed, it might try the second-most likely letter to precede ?T?, or see what other letters the opponent had showing and try to guess a letter before or after that. The logic worked quite well, and many games were evenly matched. One of the neatest things I recall is that Ted Scott took apart a Texas Instrument ?Speak & Spell? game and created an interface between it and the PET. He created some software that would access the Speak & Spell?s vocabulary and the computer could cause it to talk. He loaned me this modified Speak & Spell for a few days, and I modified my PROBE game to speak the letters as they were guessed. Could this possibly have been the first TALKING game? My dad and I worked on a Backgammon game. We devised a routine for the computer to make educated moves. I was the ?graphics guru? and my dad was the logical thinker, so we worked well on this project together. Unfortunately, the 8k PET memory didn?t give us enough space to refine our backgammon playing strategy as much as we wanted. Fortunately, a company called CompuThink was coming out with a memory expansion board that you could mount inside the PET to expand the memory up to 32K. NEECO ?loaned? (that?s what they said, but I often wonder if my grandfather purchased it) us a 24k expansion board to refine our Backgammon game. The CompuThink board also had 2 expansion ?slots?, and they soon came out with a floppy disk drive that you could plug into the board. This drive was out before Commodore?s floppy disk drive. I got a CompuThink disk drive which made my life much easier. Many ended up buying the Commodore disk drive, but I much preferred the CompuThink dual drive system for the PET. My dad got frustrated with not being able to get enough time for himself on the PET, and ended up buying an Apple II for himself. At first, I didn?t pay much attention to the Apple II, but over time I became intrigued with it?s graphics, capability to run a modem (which I couldn?t do with the PET), and a friend asked me to write some software on the Apple II for him, so the PET started to get less use. NEECO moved their store from Springfield to Needham, MA (near Boston) and our little Saturday informal group more or less broke up. I still have my PET, although I?m sure it is not operational. I did have some power supply problems at one time, which Ted Scott fixed. It ran fine for a while, but I believe the problems came back and that?s when I finally stopped using the PET. It has probably developed other problems that would keep it from running now also. I don?t think the CompuThink memory board is installed anymore, but I probably still have it. I know I still have the CompuThink disk drive. I can take some pictures of this equipment if anyone is interested. I?ve been able to restore some of my games that were saved to tape into a current PET simulator program by playing the tapes into a PC soundcard, and having a decoder program decode the sound on the tapes and store it in disk files. Unfortunately, most of my later (and better) PET work was saved on floppy disks. I believe I still have the disks, but have no idea if they still contain data, or how to go about getting them read into a PC. The programs I know I have recovered are PROBE, STAR WARS, and some version (I?m sure not the ?latest and greatest?) Backgammon. - Bob Lafleur Springfield, MA USA