The Introduction Of The Commodore Pet
In December of 1977 Commodore released the Commodore PET! It was priced quite competitively with the Apple II and the TRS-90 computers, the computers released similar times to the release of the Commodore PET. In actuality the Commodore PET was actually the Commodore PET 2001 as Commodore released more variations of the PET. The original 2001 model featured an inbuilt CRT display measuring at a mere 40 columns of characters by 25 rows, 4K of RAM (with only around 3K usable memory for the user) and included an integrated cassette recorder.
Some images of the Commodore PET 2001
The PET was popular in use by schools and was used in many computer labs. The disk drive, while expensive, could be daisy chained and connected to several PETs saving money and space.