Origins

The chiclet keyboard of the PET 2001 series

Drawing of chiclet keyboard of the PET 2001 series

An early PET 2001 integrated cassette recorder

PET 2001 with its top lifted

In the 1970s, Commodore was one of many electronics companies selling calculators
designed around Dallas-based Texas Instruments (TI) chips. TI faced increasing
competition from Japanese vertically-integrated companies who were using new CMOS-
based processes and had a lower total cost of production. These companies began to
undercut TI business, so TI responded by entering the calculator market directly in
1975. As a result, TI was selling complete calculators at lower price points than
they sold just the chipset to their former customers, and the industry that had
built up around it was frozen out of the market.

Commodore initially responded by beginning their own attempt to form a vertically-

integrated calculator line as well, purchasing a vendor in California that was
working on a competitive CMOS calculator chip and an LED production line. They also
went looking for a company with an existing calculator chip line, something to tide
them over in the immediate term, and this led them to MOS Technology. MOS had been
building calculator chips for some time, but more recently had begun to branch out
into new markets with its 6502 microprocessor design, which they were trying to
bring to market.

Along with the 6502 came Chuck Peddle's KIM-1 design, a small computer kit based on
the 6502. At Commodore, Peddle convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were a dead-
end and that Commodore should explore the burgeoning microcomputer market instead.
At first, they considered purchasing an existing design, and in September 1976
Peddle got a demonstration of Jobs and Wozniak's Apple II prototype. Jobs was
offering to sell it to Commodore, but Commodore considered Jobs's offer too
expensive.[6]

Release
The Commodore PET was officially announced in 1976 and Jack Tramiel gave Chuck
Peddle six months to have the computer ready for the January 1977 Consumer
Electronics Show, with his team including John Feagans, Bill Seiler, two Japanese
engineers named Fujiyama and Aoji, and Jack's son Leonard Tramiel who helped design
the PETSCII graphic characters and acted as quality control.[7]

The result was Commodore's first mass-market personal computer, the PET, the first
model of which was