PET Peripherals

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  2017-08-29 Added the CBM8010 RS232 coupler.
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  2015-02-01 Started this page

• RS232 modems
• • CBM8010 acoustic coupler
• Non-CBM Disk Drives
• • Computhink extension

CBM8010 acoustic coupler

The PET did not have built-in RS232 code like its successors the VIC20 and C64 etc, it had to rely on special software (see for example the Hardware projects and Extensions pages. But Commodore also sold an RS232 peripheral - that was connected via the IEEE488 bus, the CBM 8010. It is an acoustic coupler, where you can press in the speaker of your old-style telephone, and the loudspeaker in the coupler is "talking" to the microphone on the speaker, while the loudspeaker in the speaker talks to the microphone in the coupler. Those were the days when you were not allowed to make electronic contact with the telephone line...

• CBM8010

Computhink extension

When the PET came out, Commodore did not yet have disk drives ready for it. In fact the IEEE488 part of the ROM was broken, so that later a ROM upgrade from BASIC1 to BASIC2 was necessary to make the Commodore drives work.

Thus the other vendors chimed in and Computhink actually had disk drives ready before Commodore. Of course they then were completely incompatible and even relied on a built-in extension board. This board, the "Expandamem" board contains a memory expansion (remember, the very first machines really had only 4k of RAM...). On this board again there are expansion slots, one of the could be used for the computhink drive.

In fact the drives - with their ROM code - was not working any more on the later BASIC2 machines.

• Chipitos' web site
• Thread on the Vintage Computer Forum
• Nightfall crew's site
• Nightfall crew's Computhink manual (PDF)