jac_goudsmit
Experienced Member
In 1978 or so when I was 10 or 11, I saw the PET for the first time at a friend's house. He didn't let me touch it or even come close to it. Then in 1979 I started high school and found out they had a PET-2001, and a little later also a 4032 and an 8032.
I learned to type on the chiclet keyboard (and I was pretty frustrated later on when we got our first IBM PC at home where you had to use Shift to get to all the useful characters above the QWERTY row
but my favorite computer in school was the 4032 because of course the keyboard was a lot nicer than the 2001 and it had the graphics characters on it, unlike the 8032 (also: stupid 80 columns on the screen made the 8032 incompatible with a lot of software written for the other two). Even after the school got a Commodor 64 (much later), the 4032 remained my favorite because I knew it so well. Also, by now, a bunch of younger kids than me had started showing up in the computer lab and they favored the C64 so it was always in use.
Fast forward to 2012: I used to own two Amigas but when I emigrated from the Netherlands to the USA I had to let them go (ironic because my A3000 had an American power supply and needed a transformer to work at 230V). I never owned any 8-bit Commodore machines though they still have a warm place in my heart because they're the first computers I ever worked/played with. Then I saw this 4016 on eBay that kept not getting sold and kept getting relisted. Okay $300 is a lot of money for a machine that old, and there was only one picture, but it looked like it was in excellent state and it was shown with the BASIC 4.0 power-on message and 32K (not 16K) installed. So I figured hey, my birthday is coming up, and I'm working on this project to reproduce retro computers with a 6502 and a Propeller (http://www.propeddle.com) that I'll be selling at the Parallax Expo next week if all goes well, so this would be an awesome trip on memory lane and it might attract more attention at the Expo than just a couple of little bags with parts.
When I got it, it looked even more pristine than I expected:
In fact it looks like it came straight off the production line. Even the screws to keep the lid down were still there. I had never seen that before!
I expected that it would need some dusting but this was absolutely the cleanest computer I had ever seen (bar the ones that were brand new). It was even cleaner than the computers at school 32 years ago, and that's when they were new! Clearly this one hadn't been used much. So I decided to leave it as it is: the pictures show the dust levels pretty much the way I got it.
This is an early 4000 series motherboard (not a "FAT40"), so there is no CRT controller: video is generated with TTL IC's. The 32K of RAM is factory installed (all RAM chips have the same date code) which is kinda weird: I'd expect that a 4016 would have 16K from the factory, and if there's more it would be an aftermarket addition.
The IC's are all dated 1980, except for the ROMs: they're from 1981. Maybe the original owner updated the ROMs.
(Continued)
I learned to type on the chiclet keyboard (and I was pretty frustrated later on when we got our first IBM PC at home where you had to use Shift to get to all the useful characters above the QWERTY row
but my favorite computer in school was the 4032 because of course the keyboard was a lot nicer than the 2001 and it had the graphics characters on it, unlike the 8032 (also: stupid 80 columns on the screen made the 8032 incompatible with a lot of software written for the other two). Even after the school got a Commodor 64 (much later), the 4032 remained my favorite because I knew it so well. Also, by now, a bunch of younger kids than me had started showing up in the computer lab and they favored the C64 so it was always in use.Fast forward to 2012: I used to own two Amigas but when I emigrated from the Netherlands to the USA I had to let them go (ironic because my A3000 had an American power supply and needed a transformer to work at 230V). I never owned any 8-bit Commodore machines though they still have a warm place in my heart because they're the first computers I ever worked/played with. Then I saw this 4016 on eBay that kept not getting sold and kept getting relisted. Okay $300 is a lot of money for a machine that old, and there was only one picture, but it looked like it was in excellent state and it was shown with the BASIC 4.0 power-on message and 32K (not 16K) installed. So I figured hey, my birthday is coming up, and I'm working on this project to reproduce retro computers with a 6502 and a Propeller (http://www.propeddle.com) that I'll be selling at the Parallax Expo next week if all goes well, so this would be an awesome trip on memory lane and it might attract more attention at the Expo than just a couple of little bags with parts.
When I got it, it looked even more pristine than I expected:
In fact it looks like it came straight off the production line. Even the screws to keep the lid down were still there. I had never seen that before!
I expected that it would need some dusting but this was absolutely the cleanest computer I had ever seen (bar the ones that were brand new). It was even cleaner than the computers at school 32 years ago, and that's when they were new! Clearly this one hadn't been used much. So I decided to leave it as it is: the pictures show the dust levels pretty much the way I got it.
This is an early 4000 series motherboard (not a "FAT40"), so there is no CRT controller: video is generated with TTL IC's. The 32K of RAM is factory installed (all RAM chips have the same date code) which is kinda weird: I'd expect that a 4016 would have 16K from the factory, and if there's more it would be an aftermarket addition.
The IC's are all dated 1980, except for the ROMs: they're from 1981. Maybe the original owner updated the ROMs.
(Continued)
