The PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) was a home/personal computer produced by Commodore starting in 1977. It was a top seller in the Canadian, US, and UK educational markets, and was Commodore's first full-featured computer and would form the basis for their entire 8-bit platform.
In the 1970s, Texas Instruments was the main supplier of CPUs for use in calculators. Many companies sold calculator designs based on their chip sets, including Com...
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The PET (Personal Electronic Transactor) was a home/personal computer produced by Commodore starting in 1977. It was a top seller in the Canadian, US, and UK educational markets, and was Commodore's first full-featured computer and would form the basis for their entire 8-bit platform.
In the 1970s, Texas Instruments was the main supplier of CPUs for use in calculators. Many companies sold calculator designs based on their chip sets, including Commodore. However, in 1975 TI increased the price to the point where the chip set alone cost more than what TI sold their entire calculators for, and the industry they had built up was frozen out of the market.
Commodore responded by looking for a chip set of their own they could purchase outright, and quickly found MOS Technology, Inc. who were bringing their 6502 microprocessor design to market. Along with the company came Chuck Peddle's KIM-1 design, a small computer kit based on the 6502. At Commodore, Peddle convinced Jack Tramiel that...
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