Back in 1976 / 1977 when Apple was first getting started, they had two primary competitors: the TRS-80 from Tandy Radio Shack, and the PET from Commodore. Commodore was mostly known as a calculator company in those days, and it was easy to tell: the earliest PET's had horrid keyboards based on calculator buttons. Thankfully that design was short-lived, and was soon replaced by something closer to a modern keyboard (although the layout on this keyboard is insane). I also just love that they decided to call this thing the PET as a nod to the then-popular "pet rock" fad… but then the pet rock fad died, so Commodore tried to pretend that it had always been an acronym for "Personal Electronic Transactor."
I found this PET at a local junk shop last fall, along with some accessories and software (on cassette tape!). The machine seemed to be booting to BASIC but the display was badly garbled and basically unusable. I'm reasonably comfortable doing basic electronics repairs, replacing through-hole capacitors, etc., but anything involving CRT's are outside my comfort zone. Thankfully I've got a go-to guy for this kind of work (hi Sean, if you're reading this!) and he was able to do some really excellent repair work on the CRT. There's a bit of downwards bowing in the image which I'm sure he can fix, but honestly I kind of love how it looks – something about it feels right, even if it's not perfectly within factory spec.
Going by the tags on the rear of the case, this PET left the factory as a 2001-8N model with 8KB of RAM, but there's a handwritten note mentioning that it was upgraded to 32KB, which is also reflected in the BASIC boot-screen. I've recently purchased a clever gadget called an SD2PET, which goes into the expansion ports on the rear of the machine and allows it to use an SD card as if it were a floppy drive – that's how I got TRON loaded for this picture.
My family and I are going to be exhibiting this machine for free/public hands-on play at the California Historical Radio Society Museum in Alameda, CA on Saturday. If you happen to be in the Bay Area and want to pet a PET (and/or play with around a dozen other rare computers and gaming consoles we're bringing), come on down!