My AI Origin Story: Part One - The PET

A gnome illusionist made of ASCII is cooler than you think

Jul 23, 2025

The seeds of my transformation were planted long ago when my dad, a principal at Dalewood Middle School in Hamilton, Ontario, would bring home a Commodore PET 2001 on weekends so my brothers, sister, and I could play around with it. Maybe learn something.

It was cool and I learned a lot.

I played a very primitive text-based fantasy role playing game called dnd. It was a dungeon crawler inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, where we explored mazes, battled monsters, and collected treasure using typed commands. I was probably a elf fighter [GET SWORD] or a gnome illusionist [MAKE WALL DISAPPEAR] and there were probably incredibly cool ASCII graphics of monsters and taverns.

I also used the PET to write some very pre-historic code but didn’t have the patience to really pursue it.

I was, however, hooked on the idea that computers are these really interesting electronic tools that can tell interactive stories, that can do wild, weird things. Spooky, even, at the time.

So if I trace my AI Origin Story story back to its nascent, logical starting point it’s right there - on the dining room table in the house that I grew up in sometime in the early 80’s. My dad had just lugged that unwieldy thing up the front steps, set it down, and plugged it in.

And it was on!

Let’s talk about how awesome the Commodore PET 2001 really was for its time

LOOK AT ALL THAT TEXT!

To think that in the ancient, mist-shrouded distant past of the early eighties you could write marketing copy anchored by a single sentence that possessed no fewer than two semi-colons, that reads,

The Commodore PET — Its technology is so advance; its concept, so remarkable; its ease of operation, so utterly simple, and its cost so incredibly low, that over-night it has given rise to a brand new era — The Age of the Personal Computer.

DAMN, EVERYONE. DAMN.

And before you even start to think that maybe you think that the Commdore PET 2001 wasn’t a complete circuit-breaking, game-changing, bad-ass piece of technology let me just say:

WE STORED OUR DATA ON CASSETTE, B

Here’s the specs for this mythical beast

Design

All-in-one unit: Integrated keyboard, 9” monochrome CRT display, and built-in cassette tape deck for data storage
Case: Heavy metal wedge-shaped housing (iconic and durable)
Keyboard: Original models had a chiclet-style keyboard

Processor

CPU: MOS Technology 6502, running at 1 MHz

Memory

RAM:
- PET 2001-4: 4 KB of RAM
- PET 2001-8: 8 KB of RAM
ROM: 14 KB (included BASIC interpreter and system software)
Storage: Built-in cassette tape drive (standard audio cassettes used for program/data storage)

I/O and Peripherals

Expansion port: allowed connection to peripherals like:
- Dot matrix printers (e.g., Commodore 2022 or 3022 printers)
- Dual floppy disk drives (like the Commodore 2040)
IEEE-488 port: A standardized interface for connecting external devices

Display

Built-in 9” monochrome CRT
40×25 character text display
No graphics mode per se — but developers cleverly used ASCII characters for visual effects, maps, and UI

Notable

Included Microsoft BASIC built into ROM
The cassette deck was both a cost-saving feature and a nightmare: slow, unreliable, but better than nothing

Long before I was building GPTs for work and play, and before I joined the BC + AI Community and plugged myself directly into the mainframe organization of heads from across every discipline, before I had a Twitter account, before internet cafes in Lloyd D Jackson Square where I created my first email account and explored the alternate reality of online discussion boards, there was the Commodore PET 2001.