11 Facts About PET 2001

Commodore PET 2001 is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International.

PET 2001 design underwent a series of updates: more memory, better keyboard, larger screen, and other modifications.

PET 2001'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.

The PET 2001 had somewhat of a competitive advantage over its Apple II and TRS-80 rivals as both were using relatively primitive integer BASICs for their first six months on the market while the PET 2001 had a full-featured BASIC with floating point support, a sophisticated screen editor, and lowercase letters, the last being a feature that the two competing platforms would not have for a few years.

The PET 2001-N switched to using conventional DRAM instead of the 6550 SRAM in the original model.

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The resurrected PET 2001 was sold through 1986 and then finally retired for good, having been superseded by the Commodore 128, 1571, and 1581.

Commodore released a High Resolution Graphic board for the PET 2001 using the Thomson EF936x graphics chip with a resolution of 512×512 pixels.

The PET 2001's lack of a remappable character set is a major weakness in the machine's design.

Colour PET 2001 emulation is available in the newer versions of the Vice Emulator software.

PET 2001 had two empty sockets on the motherboard for adding expansion ROMs, which could be a total of 8K in size.

ETI Canada wrote that the Commodore PET 2001 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.