Socket issue in Commodore PETS

On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 3:40 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: I understand your comment about how perception colors what is "common", but between the ECCC/VCFmw show last year in Chicago and my own house, I've seen at least half a dozen PETs owned by several people in the past twelve months, and corresponded with several more PET owners. Doesn't mean they are "common" where you are (who ever "you" is and wherever "you are" is), but I've seen more PETs in the past 10 years than TRS-80s or Apple IIs of the same vintage (i.e., not a CoCo, not a IIe or IIgs, etc). They were popular in educational environments in the US and the UK before the Apple dumped container-loads of Apple IIes on schools in the late 1980s. If you didn't live around one of these school districts, then it's likely that PETs are not common to you. I purchased several from the local University surplus in one lot in the early 1990s (for $10-$15 each, disk drives and printers extra). Location and timing is everything. Clearly the distribution is not even, but for pre-1980 machines, I'd classify them as "common". Not as common as the C-64, but then nothing else is. -ethan