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Commodore PET 2001N Mystery Cutouts

TangentDelta

TangentDelta

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Jan 25, 2015
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I brushed the dust off of my PET 2001N today to take some pictures of it for reference. I noticed that at the top of the housing there are some brass ferrules embedded into the plastic. As I inspected it further, I also noticed a pair of cutouts on the front of the chassis with black plastic covers.

The cutouts and mounting points would be perfect for a disk drive option. Was this something that Commodore planned to offer?

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Yes. There's a write-up on this somewhere. But it was something that obviously never came to be.
 
KC9UDX said:
Yes. There's a write-up on this somewhere. But it was something that obviously never came to be.
Click to expand...

Interesting! I tried searching for a write-up, or any sort of reference to the cutouts yesterday but came up short. Do you happen to have a lead on that write-up?
 
As I recall (keep in mind that it's been 30+ years), there was a plan to install diskette drives there, but never happened.
 
Yes, Commodore planned to have internal drives. The early 1010,1020,1030 drives were supposedly "DMA" drives that would use the existing PET CPU and RAM. They designed this case specifically for those drives. It's possible they abandoned it because of the PET's limited RAM and ROM space, or perhaps just to sell IEEE drives with higher profit margins. It would not be until the 8296D that commodore would have a PET machine with internal drives. The 8296D used the SK cases designed for the CBM-II series machines. When the CBM-II series was designed Commodore went back to the idea again to DMA drives (it's in the sales literature) given that the CBM-II CPU could handle much more RAM (1MB). Commodore prototyped a DMA drive for the CBM-II, but sadly was never completed due to the cancellation of the series.

There were several DMA-type boards for the PET back in the day, based on standard FDC chips. One such board was the PEDISK-II from CGRS, which a group of us cloned.
 
Thank you so much for all of this excellent information!

Is the black "Commodore PET" cover stuck to the front with adhesive? I don't want to remove it if it's potentially destructive, but if it can be easily removed I'd consider looking into adding disk drives to my PET as a project.
 
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