1: Hey I just got a pet!
2: Wow! What is it? A dog? A cat?
1: No, it's a commodore

This is the computer that Satoru Iwata started out on when he decided to get into programming.

Mr. Iwata (President of Nintendo from 2002-2015) was great at programming games on the PET

Rewatching in 2025, it's so cozy and well narrated :)

Great. My piano teacher was obsessed with the Pet, and instead of teaching me to play piano, he taught me how to program the Pet. That shaped my life in a very favourable way.😀

The "killer poke" originally had a useful purpose: on the older PETs, it would speed up the text display. It was only on the later PETs with the updated design that it would make the video go out of sync and potentially damage the CRT circuitry. After this was discovered, Commodore updated the circuitry to make the CRT immune to the killer poke. So in reality, only a small number of PETs are affected, and actual, verified reports of damage caused by it are rare.

WARNING if you feed the PET chips after midnight it will byte you!

I remember the pet in 3rd grade. We had a manual typewriter at home so yes I instantly recognized the keyboard was  ridiculous.

Ah, memories. The PET was the first genuine "microcomputer" I used. Prior to that, computing was done using a steam powered terminal hooked up to a mainframe over the phone line. A giant mechanical Olivetti terminal that weighed as much as a small AFV, and made almost as much noise during operation. The PET was a huge relief when you come from that background!

Using an IEEE-488 interface was a stroke of genius on the part of the PET designers. This is because the IEEE-488 interface was the standard for scientific instrumentation in the 1980s, and as a consequence, you could plug everything from mass spectrometers to desktop sized centrifuges into the PET, and the PET would drive them with a short program consisting of about 25-30 lines of BASIC. Indeed, I used one to drive a weird piece of industrial engraving machinery in 1983, because the machinery used an IEEE-488 interface, and once you understood what commands to send to the machine, you could drive the machine with a 30-line BASIC program. Plug and Play, 1980s style!

As someone who cut his teeth on the KIM-1, helped a friend with their SYM-1, learned BASIC on the PET 2001, helped his father with his AIM-65 mail-order business, and became a C64 wizard...  I approve this video.  This touches on most of my elementary school computing.

"4k is a ridiculously small amount of RAM"
ZX80: Hold my byte

A big thank you for mentioning the BBC Micro. That was huge in the UK. Love the 6502, it has lovely op-codes.

The Demoscene has some truly mythical programming skills

7:00 Yes, I paused to read that nonsense ;-)

I still remember playing "Star Trek" on a PET in 1977... my teacher had it and we could earn points in class to get time on it.  Fun times!  Klingons on the screen were the letter "K" and stars were asterisks.  It was the first computer I ever had my hands on!

17:10   Proceeds to delete system 32

David: Complaints about the pet
David's Shirt: I LOVE MY PET

I can't believe that you missed out some very important computers that actually used the 6502.
a) The Terminator in T-1
b) Bender and Flexo from Futurama
;)

"is anyone gonna bother to read this?"

y e s, w e  w i l l

Many people who bought a Commodore PET had learned to type on a manual typewriter! That keyboard would have been strange to them.