This baby was built to LAST!
Sometime in the early 90s I acquired a PET 2001 via the Trading Post. A 2001-16N to be precise - 16KB RAM, full keyboard, external tape drive. I paid more for shipping than I did for the computer itself - the thing weighs a tonne! The casing is made out of steel - not the plastic that most dinky home computers were made out of!
To be honest, I have never done a great deal with the PET. It hooks up to standard Commodore tape drives (so it is a trivial matter to transfer data between a Commodore 64 and the PET for instance) but I have no other peripherals such as disk drives) for it.
The PET uses Commodore BASIC (v1 I presume - there is no version number) and starts up with 15,359 bytes free. Unfortunately there are no graphic capabilities to speak of apart from the PETCSII graphic characters. The characterset is stored in ROM and unlike later Commodore computers, the characterset cannot be copied to RAM and modified. Also, there are no lowercase characters available - uppercase only.
I’v just plugged it in and turned it on - the inbuilt 9″ monitor is still looking nice a crisp even after all these years. (No, I was never tempted to try the killer poke!) About the only problem with the old beast is some of the keys are not terribly responsive, but that should be easily fixed with a little cleaning and TLC. Please excuse my while I indulge… 
10 PRINT "OLD SKOOL COMPUTERS ROCK!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN
July 10th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Those are the first machines I ever programmed on. I was in 7th grade, which would have been… 1980? The Jr. High had exactly one, not that model, but the one with the build-in tape drive I think. We got a couple of the ones shown here later that year. So yes, the first year the school offered programming, thirty students per period, and one PET.
I recall that there was a really good Space Invaders port for the PET.
July 10th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
IIRC, Jeff Minter (the Llamalicious one) started his programming career writing games on a PET.
I posted earlier about my start with computers - on an Apple II. I was always one or two years out as far as Computer Studies courses went at school, so I never got any “official” instruction at school, but I helped out a lot with the junior grades when they got to do computer studies. For many years though, one Apple II (and a ZX-80 stuffed away in a drawer) was all we had…
December 21st, 2006 at 2:35 pm
I bought a PET 2001 with an extra 24K of RAM back in 1979.There are two character sets in ROM.
POKE 59468, 14orPRINT CHR$(14)to switch to the one with lowercase letters in place of some of the graphics characters.POKE 59468, 12orPRINT CHR$(142)to switch back.