Introduction
For as long as I can remember, I have had two particularly keen interests: all things old and obsolete, and computers. Naturally, I especially love vintage computers. At an early age, I would browse websites like oldcomputers.net to look at the photos and read about the many diverse machines from the 1970s and ’80s.
As soon as I saw pictures of the Commodore PET, I was enamoured with it. The all-in-one design was deliciously retro, and its trapezium-shaped monitor housing so eye-catching. It was one of the first personal computers, having come out several years before the IBM 5150 (the descendants of which we simply call “PCs” today) and Apple Mac. Over the years, I’ve managed to acquire and enjoy a few of Commodore’s later models (the VIC-20 and 128D), but the PET has always been my favourite vintage computer.
Unlike those later Commodores, PETs are very hard to come by here in Australia. They rarely appear for sale, and the few I’ve seen on eBay were mostly North American units (with 115V power supplies) that someone had imported. Unfortunately for me, I tend to want original local-market examples of the things I collect. But in 2023, after years of searching, I finally found my holy grail.
Repair & Preservation
The new PET needs some repairs done before we can play with it. I don’t necessarily want to do a total restoration, but rather focus on preservation. My tertiary education is in Computer Science, so I’m far from a qualified engineer or technician when it comes to hardware. Being inexperienced with electronic diagnosis and repair, I want to approach this project slowly and methodically. As my PET project progresses, I will document it here.
Part 1: Taking stock
Before we can even think about repairs or restoration: what exactly do we have here? Unfortunately, I don’t know the history of this machine—the eBay seller said it had come with something else he’d bought and knew nothing about it—but I’ll try to infer as much as possible from what I can see.