One of my elementary school classrooms had an ancient PET shoved into a corner. (To the left is a photo of a
Commodore PET 4032.) I talked my teacher into letting me boot up the PET before class one morning. There was dusty stack of 5.25" floppies next to the bulky case. I loaded an educational version of Hangman. This is before I realized using the computers at school for anything other than typing a paper is extremely nerdy. Luckily my classmates hadn't learned that yet, either. Almost all of my pals enjoyed playing games on the PET. Hangman became a pre-class routine for a while, all thanks to our mastery of the Commodore BASIC command
LOAD "$",8,1. Now as a grown-up I own a much more advanced Commodore, the C-64. I discovered my personal C-64 at a garage sale. The sel
ler tried to dissuade me from buying it. She said it was really old and hard to figure out. I persisted and she let me give her $2 for the computer, the monitor, a 1541 floppy disk drive and a box of games. I don't what she was thinking. The C-64 is not hard to use at all. The garage sale lady must have forgotten the
LOAD "$",8,1 command. Well, her loss was my gain. Recently I've been wishing I could type my column for the
Farmington Independent on the Commodore to give it a little exercise, since I don't have much time for games, even Hangman. The problem is the Commodore can't run Word 2003. This week I learned my wish is on the verge of coming true. Commodore is releasing a
brand-new 10-inch laptop. It's so tiny, so cute and so Commodore! Hats off t
o my favorite computing brand for coming out with a new little pal for the PET. I'm glad they're finally trying to catch up and make themselves relevant in the 21st century. No news yet on the laptop's actual release date. I will be watching the blogs, ready to put in my order. I can't imagine toting around my old Commodore, but perhaps a the new one might be light enough to snuggle into my laptop bag without pulling my shoulder out of its socket.
One of my elementary school classrooms had an ancient PET shoved into a corner. (To the left is a photo of a Commodore PET 4032.) I talked my teacher into letting me boot up the PET before class one morning. There was dusty stack of 5.25" floppies next to the bulky case. I loaded an educational version of Hangman. This is before I realized using the computers at school for anything other than typing a paper is extremely nerdy. Luckily my classmates hadn't learned that yet, either. Almost all of my pals enjoyed playing games on the PET. Hangman became a pre-class routine for a while, all thanks to our mastery of the Commodore BASIC command 
ler tried to dissuade me from buying it. She said it was really old and hard to figure out. I persisted and she let me give her $2 for the computer, the monitor, a 1541 floppy disk drive and a box of games. I don't what she was thinking. The C-64 is not hard to use at all. The garage sale lady must have forgotten the 
o my favorite computing brand for coming out with a new little pal for the PET. I'm glad they're finally trying to catch up and make themselves relevant in the 21st century. No news yet on the laptop's actual release date. I will be watching the blogs, ready to put in my order. I can't imagine toting around my old Commodore, but perhaps a the new one might be light enough to snuggle into my laptop bag without pulling my shoulder out of its socket.
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