by Leonard Tramiel Looking at a list of the chips used in Commodore calculators we see some letter and number combinations that are quite meaningful, if you know the stories. Some of the most sophisticated processors that Commodore made were based on a custom chip set that used a common processor and different ROMs (or two) that contained the code for that particular model. I wrote the firmware…
by Leonard Tramiel After my first academic year in graduate school, I came home for the summer where I returned to the PET program at Commodore. One of the tasks I was given was to review a box of software that been submitted so that Commodore would sell the software. I didn't recommend that Commodore take any of the software. One piece of software deserves special attention. I said that this…
by Neil Harris They say that life begins at 40, but for me it really began at 25. It was January, 1981. My mother called me up to tell me that she heard on the radio that Commodore was holding an open house hiring event in the Philadelphia suburbs. That was exciting news, with a few reservations. My former boss and mentor, Gene Beals at AB Computers, had told many stories of Jack Tramiel…
by Neil Harris By the later part of 1981, I spent much of my time on the road, helping the sales executives whose mission was to get Commodore home computers into the mass merchant channel. I was a sort of sales engineer, even though that role had not been defined in our industry just yet – my job was to demonstrate the machines and describe what they could do in terms that lay people would…
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demos on the PET and answering the questions of those that walked by. I noticed a large group of people approaching, but at first I didn’t recognize anyone. As they got closer I saw that it was Bill Gates leading the others around. There was a translator repeating…
by Leonard Tramiel In another post I mentioned that one summer I wrote the firmware for a couple of Commodore’s calculators. Commodore had a wide variety of proprietary calculator chips that they used for an even wider range of calculators. The earliest example I can think of is what I think was Commodore’s first calculator that had only one chip. Prior to this there were two chips. One that did…
by Leonard Tramiel Much of the impetus for this blog is the deluge of misinformation that is “out there”. One of the best defined, single instances, is Michael Tomczyk’s story of a Commodore management meeting near London, England. He characterizes it as a marketing meeting. Given my father’s complete disdain for the term “marketing”, and everything that goes with it, I can confidently dismiss the…
by Neil Harris It was March of 1978 and I was in love. We had been dating for a year, and it was time to get serious. I knew that because she told me so. “I won’t marry you until you get yourself on a career path.” I was young and directionless until that point. I had learned to program computers in high school and had spent every free moment there writing games and other programs. But programming…
by Leonard Tramiel When Chuck Peddle was given the go ahead to bring his ideas of what would become the PET computer into reality many of the ingredients were only loosely constrained. One example is the character set. It would clearly need to have alpha-numeric characters and the basic punctuation. But that was far too limiting for many recreational uses of the machine. It should be possible to…
by John Feagans The moth sculpture outside Coover Hall on the Iowa State Ames campus. Why a moth? It represents the first computer bug found when Admiral Grace Hopper removed a moth stuck between relay contacts. There are pure bugs and then there are design flaws that are also bugs. In the 8k PET we started noticing a period of time where the PET would seem to hang then wakeup again. I traced it…
by Leonard Tramiel Some early PET users reported that their machines would "hang". After doing ... something the machine would become unresponsive. Nothing short of a power cycle would get the machine back into operation. The hardware folk on the project said it was obviously a software problem and, not surprisingly, the software folk said it was a hardware problem. As mentioned in another entry…
by Leonard Tramiel VIC concept computer at Chicago summer CES 1980. Photo by John Feagans. As mentioned in another one of these posts, I was asked by my dad to give him my opinion of going along with Chuck Peddle’s idea for a computer. Shortly after working in the team that developed that machine from idea to fully working prototype I left Commodore to further my education. While in my apartment…
by Leonard Tramiel One of the events in the year or so I spent working on the PET that sticks out in my mind was testing the first batch of boards. It felt surreal, even at the time, to take a board out of a box, plug in a power supply, monitor, and keyboard and have a computer that was unavailable only a short time before. The first batch of PET boards used an ... unusual RAM chip made by MOS…
By John Feagans MDT 650 connected ICE to 2020 printer board in development The first 6502 cross assembler was written in Fortran by Michael Corder--aka the Cordless Electric Programmer. Before it was installed on the 360 I had to preface my 6502 assembler punched cards by this huge deck of the assembler program itself written in Fortran, then wait for the batch processing. Later MOS Technology…
By John Feagans The first almost production PET boards had arrived and been brought up. Bill Seiler and I chose to celebrate by taking an afternoon break on May 25, 1977 by watching the Star Wars debut at the Winchester Cinema in San Jose. Inspired by the movie, Bill changed some labels in the IEE-488 software handshake to include assembly language labels R2D2 and C3PO. The tech was making a bill…
By John Feagans When Heinlein wrote "Door Into Summer", once he had the title, he wrote the entire science fiction novel in 13 days. I told Chuck Peddle in the morning from the hotel room after my "interview" that I decided to accept the offer, Sunday, May 1st, 1977. He put me to work immediately and it was almost three weeks before I could return to Des Moines airport and recover my car!…
by Leonard Tramiel In early 1977 the prototype PET computer, now in the collection of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA, was shown at a large electronics trade show in Hannover, Germany. I was given the task of taking the machine. Since it was a fairly delicate device that used an internal card cage with wire wrapped cards it had a ticket for the seat next to me on the plane. There…
by Leonard Tramiel Shortly after Commodore bought MOS Technology Dad told me that he needed my help to evaluate a proposal he had been been given by an MOS employee. Chuck Peddle told my father that he was going to build a personal computer. If Commodore wanted the product he would do it as an employee. If they didn't them he would quit and do it on his own. The fact that dad wanted my opinion was…
by John Feagans Like the Heinlein cat I still looking for my Door Into Summer , when out of the blue, I got a call from Chuck Peddle on a Saturday afternoon. I had just packed the last of my possessions into my VW and ready to drive to Rochester, Minnesota from Ames, Iowa where I had been a computer science grad student. I had accepted a job offer from IBM to work in their System/34 group. Chuck…