Sentimental Sundays - Commodore Pet 4032

The Commodore PET 4032, released in 1980, was a significant upgrade to the original PET 2001 and a pivotal machine in the early days of personal computing. It featured a 40-character display and 32 KB of RAM, making it more powerful and versatile than its predecessors. The 4032 was equipped with the MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor running at 1 MHz, and it came with an enhanced BASIC 4.0, which added commands for disk functions and significantly improved garbage cleanup. The machine's robust all-metal construction and all-in-one design made it particularly well-suited for classroom use, where it became a major success. The PET 4032 also included an IEEE-488 port, which allowed for the creation of a simple local area network, enabling shared printers and disk drives, which were expensive at the time. This feature, combined with its durability, made the 4032 a popular choice in educational settings, where it played a crucial role in introducing students to programming and computing concepts.

The Commodore PET 4032 was not just a technical marvel but also a cultural icon of the early personal computing era. It was one of the first computers to bring computing power directly into homes and offices, making it accessible to a broader audience. The machine's user-friendly Commodore BASIC operating system allowed users to write their own programs or load software from cassette tapes, fostering a sense of creativity and productivity. The PET 4032 found widespread adoption in schools and businesses, where it was used for tasks such as word processing, data management, and accounting. Its affordability and versatility made it an attractive option for educational institutions and businesses alike, laying the groundwork for Commodore's future successes, including the iconic Commodore 64.

Commodore PET 4032

Trivia: The Commodore PET 4032 was part of a "buy 2, get 1 free" program offered to schools, where Commodore donated a "Teacher's PET" as part of a promotion and tax write-off scheme. This initiative helped to further spread the use of personal computers in educational settings. Additionally, the PET 4032 had a unique "graphics keyboard" layout, with numbers exclusively on the numeric keypad and punctuation symbols on the row above the alphabet keys. This design was later modified in the "business keyboard" variants, which had a more conventional layout with numbers above the alphabet keys.

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