tics of Brett Butler, one of the first PET
owners in the Toronto area, who wrote a tiny program for his wife who was in the late stages of pregnancy: tap any key, and the PET would show time elapsed since the previous contraction.

Computer enthusiasts were regarded as mavericks. Few of those who worked in
the field of data processing would have any association with microcomputers. I suspect the reasons for this are varied. Perhaps there would be a loss of corporate prestige to admit that those little thousand dollar machines were capable of taking on some tasks, when DP personnel had a million dollar machines as their private domain. It seemed that some users would believe only what IBM told them; and, at that time, IBM had no interest in giving any credibility to these pesky little machines.

There were rebels. A Vice President of Air Canada used a Commodore PET to plan fuel needs at various airports; but he had to hide his machine from the DP mavens, who didn't approve. A regional education officer in northern Ontario supported microcomputers in schools, and helped assembly a body of educational software; all the while, the Department of Education wanted all educational flow to be centralized.

TPUG prospered, and its influence went far beyond Ontario's boundaries, or
even those of North America. Today, it may be difficult to comprehend the difficulty in distributing free programs across the country or around the world. We use the Internet. Back then, you put cassette tapes in the mail, or, later, floppy disks. And a central clearing point produced better
organization. TPUG was it, for many years; most Commodore clubs across North America became associate TPUG members. Membership reached a peak in 1984 of about 17,000 members. TPUG now had a full time staff for handling memberships and mailing requested programs, and another full time staff to publish the
TPUG magazine. There was a lot of money flowing into TPUG, and it seemed to me that this caused dissension between members of the executive and the staff.

An early online service, "The Source" opened for business in 1979, and was
soon followed by another, CompuServe. A service specific to the Commodore 64, Quantum, became available in 1985. There started to be other ways to
distribute programs. And the Internet was coming. Online services, and a shift to other manufacturers' computers, caused a further decline in membership. And this caused disputes to become more pronounced. It's easy to bring in new equipment and new staff in prosperous times; it's not so easy to start cutting back. Many old-timers dropped out of the TPUG picture. But TPUG survived, and is still active today. I'm told that the next World Of Commodore gathering
will take place this December.

XV. PRODUCT PROLIFERATION -

The original PET 2001 was soon followed by bigger models, with more memory or 80 column screens. Commodore did its best to drop the name PET in favour of CBM, so as to establish a business image. At one time, it even tried to disenfranchise one of its major retail outlets because it thought the name was too frivolous: Batteries included. The outlet set up a subsidiary with a "sensible" name and continued to handle Commodore machines.

Commodore technicians built prototypes of many imaginative machines. One of these, called the TOI, had a colour screen, graphics and sound capability; it eventually became the VIC-20. The 22-column screen of the VIC-20 made it of little utility with text applications, but it worked well with graphics, and became popular as a game machine. The VIC-20 was still a full-feature
computer, complete with the Commodore Basic language, and many people used it to learn computer programming.

There's a believable story that, long before, the chip manufacturer Texas Instruments had cost Commodore and Jack Tramiel a great deal of money on plans he had made for a calculator. The story continues that Tramiel swore revenge; and when Texas Instruments came out with a computer of their own, the TI-99,
he launched and economic war. Whatever the truth of the story, it's true that Tramiel was very good at pruning prices, pressing suppliers to drop costs in order to allow him to pitch extremely competitive retail prices. And with his next product, the Commodore 64, he trashed most of the competition - including Texas Instruments.

At one point, Commodore was offering $100 as a trade-in for any make or model of computer. Since the Sinclair/Timex Spectrum was selling for about $60 at that time, Commodore received a considerable number of these units, still in their shrink wrap packaging. The local user group told me that Commodore had
no use for these trade-ins, and they went directly to the trash bin. At night, members of the club would pick these back out of the trash and turn them back in the next day for another discount.

Doctor Wesley Graham, of the Computer Science department of Waterloo University, thought that the CBM computers could be expanded and modified so
as to allow students to take language training on them. Waterloo was already noted for its "training" languages, such as WatFor, a training dialogue of Fortran. Together with hardware assistance from BMB Compuscience, a retailer and hardware designer in the Milton area, they devised "The SuperPET" a
machine with dual processors. One "side" was a standard CBM computer; the other
was a Motorola 6809-based system fitted with several languages. Perhaps the most startling of these was APL ("A Programming Language"), developed by Ken Iverson, which used a completely different character set to undertake its computations.

The SuperPET was well respected and used in training environments, but never became a mainstream machine. I often wondered if adding language compilers -
in addition to the interpreters that Waterloo had furnished - might make it world-beating commercial machine.

XVI. FUN COMPUTERS HIT THEIR ZENITH -

Following the success of the 64, Commodore tackled the objective of making a set of scaled down computers: the Commodore Plus/4 and its smaller cousin, the Commodore 16. I had some involvement in this product: I was invited to introduce it at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, 1984.

Inside the Plus/4 and Commodore 16 was ... almost ... nothing. The various support chips that had been needed to make things work had been telescoped
into a single interface chip called TED. So there was TED, the processor, and on the Plus/4, an ACIA chip (similar to a UART) for higher speed communications. Manufacturing costs must have been remarkable low for a omputer with so few parts. But before the show, the marketing mavens told me they planned to set the price so high that it wouldn't impact sales of the Commodore 64. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams; the Plus/4 and it smaller cousin bombed in the market.

They gave up on this new line, reasoning that the marketplace required compatibility. Their next product was the Commodore 128, which was highly compatible - a switch converted it into a 64 clone - but could be switched
into CP/M mode for anyone who wanted that style of compatibility. On the "business computer" side, Commodore meddled with expanded memory. In Europe, they tried new cast stylings, and at one point almost introduced "The Porsche PET" whose case had been designed by the Porsche team.

Then they tried another approach to higher speed and more memory. The B128 and B256 computers were built, but Commodore couldn't get them going on schedule. Eventually, they were made to work, but it was too late for the marketplace, and Commodore blew them out their back door using a clearinghouse. It worked well, and many users loved them; but it was a Commodore ex-product, and Commodore didn't make them anymore.

It was becoming clear that Commodore was reaching a dead end in the 8-bit world. Commodore acquired the Amiga, originally planned as a game machine, and reconfigured it for a business/entertainment market. But that's another story, and this presentation is following the fate of the Commodore 8-bit world.

XVII. ARRIVAL OF THE IBM PC -

When the IBM PC was anno

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