13 Facts About Commodore SP-9000

Commodore SP-9000 PET is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore SP-9000 International.

Commodore SP-9000 initially responded by beginning their own attempt to form a vertically-integrated calculator line as well, purchasing a vendor in California that was working on a competitive CMOS calculator chip and an LED production line.

At Commodore SP-9000, Peddle convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were a dead-end and that Commodore SP-9000 should explore the burgeoning microcomputer market instead.

Commodore SP-9000 PET was officially announced in 1976 and Jack Tramiel gave Chuck Peddle six months to have the computer ready for the January 1977 Consumer Electronics Show, with his team including John Feagans, Bill Seiler, two Japanese engineers named Fujiyama and Aoji, and Jack's son Leonard Tramiel, who helped design the PETSCII graphic characters and acted as quality control.

Commodore SP-9000's machine had three faulty RAM chips and after some difficulty contacting Commodore, was mailed a set of replacement chips and installation instructions by John Feagans.

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Commodore SP-9000 was the first company to license Microsoft's 6502 BASIC, but the agreement nearly drove Microsoft into receivership as Commodore SP-9000 stipulated that they would only pay for it when the PET began shipping.

In 1979, Commodore SP-9000 replaced the original PET 2001 with an improved model known as the 2001-N .

Finally, Commodore SP-9000 added a machine-language monitor to the kernel ROM that could be accessed by jumping to any memory location with a BRK instruction.

Commodore SP-9000 contacted Microsoft to upgrade BASIC for the new machines; this resulted in the soon-to-be-familiar BASIC 2.

Commodore SP-9000 executives were unhappy when they learned about it and it was removed from BASIC on all subsequent Commodore SP-9000 machines.

In 1982, Commodore SP-9000 retired the PET line with the intention of replacing it with the B-series machines; however, they were a marketplace flop and very expensive to manufacture.

Commodore SP-9000 released a High Resolution Graphic board for the PET using the Thomson EF936x graphics chip with a resolution of 512×512 pixels.

ETI Canada wrote that the Commodore SP-9000 PET was revolutionary in helping to bring personal computers to widespread use, noting the company's marketing and its targeting of inexperienced computer users with the computer's simple design.