RE: Buck Rogers and the Commodore PET

Almost......

I had one of the very early PETS. Ordered it immediately after it was
announced at the trade show. It was a 4k RAM model, ordered through the
local Mr. Calculator store. After months of waiting, Commodore let me know
that my order was being summarily canceled, since the 4k machine was not
going to be produced, and if I wanted to keep my spot on the waiting list, I
had to pony up another couple hundred bucks within a very short deadline
(for the 8k model), which I did.

My PET, when it arrived, had the original ROMs, the blue bezel, the integral
cassette desk and chiclet keyboard. Within months, I learned that there was
some anomaly with the circuit board, and if I did not get it fixed, then my
PET would find itself incompatible with the current production in some way,
and I have a vague notion that it might have affected the IEEE-488
port....as in, "if you don't get this hack done, then when printers and disk
drives come out, you will not be able to use them". I returned mine to the
Mr. Calculator at a scheduled time, with the understanding that a traveling
Commodore technician would be coming by and would do some sort of minor
hack, and I never learned what it was that he did....maybe it was on the
bottom of the board.

After another short while, I learned that to keep compatible with most
software that was coming out, I needed to update the ROM set. I called
Commodore and ordered the "Update ROM", and the Commodore customer service
person told me that many people were also replacing the blue bezel with
black ones that were on the current production, so I ordered that as well.
So my PET ended up with the mainstream ROM set and a black bezel.....from
traffic in the various Commodore user group newsletters, I got the
impression that the bezel upgrade was a very common hack that many people
opted for. (I had already purchased an aftermarket keyboard that was full
size, full travel and with PETSCII graphics added to the key cap
fronts....plugged in using a long ribbon cable, and sat on the desk
immediately in front of the PET).

All this is to say that the bezel color is probably not a very reliable
indicator of PET age, at least in the sense that a black bezel does not
necessarily mean that it is NOT an early one.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: William Levak [mailto:wlevak@SDF.ORG] 
Sent: Sunday, March 31, 2019 8:41 PM
To: cbm-hackers@musoftware.de
Subject: Re: Buck Rogers and the Commodore PET


The first PETs were delivered in the fall of 1977. The episode was aired 
in Feb. 1981, which means it was filmed in 1980. Therefore it was a 
maximum of 3 years old.

The early PET,s had a blue frame around the display. The one in the 
episode had a black frame. That would make it a later version.


On Sun, 31 Mar 2019, Ethan Dicks wrote:

> On Sun, Mar 31, 2019 at 5:23 PM William Levak <wlevak@sdf.org> wrote:
>> For those in the US who watched MeTV network last night, they showed the
>> 1981 "Buck Rogers in the 25th Century" episode "Mark of the Saurian"....
>
>> Buck is in sick bay and the computer terminal next to his bed is actually
>> an early Commodore Pet Computer, complete with calculator style keyboard
>> and cassette deck in the front panel.
>
>> The PET would have been only two years old at the time.
>
> 1981 was four years after 1977...
>
> -ethan
>
>

wlevak@sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org