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88-459: The EP-101 was the first ever electronic miniprinter for printing figures and symbols and was launched by Shinshu Seiki Co. , a subsidiary of Suwa Seikosha Co., Ltd , in September 1968. The drum printer wasn't very big, being only 164 millimetres in width, 102 millimetres in height, 135 millimetres in depth and weighed 2.5 kilograms. It was created out of development work that Shinshu Seiki did for

176-435: A PC speaker -class beeper, PETs did not have sound hardware (except for the 8000 models), but it was possible to rig a circuit (attributed to Hal Chamberlin ) up to the 6522 "user" port that could be used to output square wave tones to an external amplifier, and some games supported this feature. The PET had two empty sockets on the motherboard for adding expansion ROMs, which could be a total of 8K in size. A predecessor to

264-585: A printer control language , the Epson Standard Code for Printers (or ESC/P ). It became a de facto industry standard for controlling print formatting during the era of dot matrix printers , whose popularity was initially started by the Epson MX-80. Epson Robots is the robotics design and manufacturing department of Epson. Seiko Epson produces some microcontrollers, such as the S1C63 . In 1980, Epson started

352-518: A " chiclet keyboard " because the keys resembled the chewing gum it was named after. The key tops also tended to rub off easily. Reliability was fairly poor, although that was common in many early microcomputers. Because of the poor keyboard on the PET, external replacement ones quickly appeared. The PET had somewhat of a competitive advantage over its Apple II and TRS-80 rivals as both were using relatively primitive integer BASICs for their first six months on

440-535: A "smart terminal" as well, so this single machine could replace many of the boxes currently in use at the university. Additionally this machine became a remote development environment where the user could later upload their creation to a mainframe after completing development and testing on the SuperPET. In 1982, Commodore retired the PET line with the intention of replacing it with the B-series machines; however, they were

528-416: A 1541 drive except for the back sporting an IEEE-488 connector instead of the two IEC DIN connectors . Of the previously extensive PET disk drive line, the only drives that returned were the 2031-LP and SFD-1001 (basically a 2040 and an 8250 repackaged in a 1541-style case with half-height drive mechanisms). The resurrected PET was sold through 1986 and then finally retired for good, having been superseded by

616-503: A TDA 1170 chip was used in place of the original analog circuit so that if no sync went to the monitor, it would merely be shut off rather than send spurious signals. The PET 2001 and 2001-8N had a register that would disable the video output; this was also used as output for the IEEE-488 interface, so screen flicker would occur during disk drive or printer use. It also became a popular method of producing explosion effects in games, but because

704-416: A cartridge doesn't have enough ink to complete the cleaning, a fuller cartridge must be used. However, users have the choice to swap out a cartridge that is reporting low levels for a fuller cartridge for the cleaning maintenance as needed, and then replace it with the original cartridge to use the remaining ink. The original cartridge does not need to be discarded. Commodore PET The Commodore PET

792-523: A complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) in February 2006 against 24 companies that manufactured, imported, or distributed Epson- compatible ink cartridges for resale in the U.S. On March 30, 2007, ITC judge Paul Luckern issued an initial determination that the cartridges in question did infringe upon Epson's patents . He also recommended those companies and others to be barred from manufacturing, importing, or reselling Epson cartridges in

880-553: A demonstration of Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak 's Apple II prototype. Steve Jobs was offering to sell it to Commodore, but Commodore considered Jobs' offer too expensive. The Commodore PET was officially announced in 1976 and Jack Tramiel gave Chuck Peddle six months to have the computer ready for the January 1977 Consumer Electronics Show , with his team including John Feagans, Bill Seiler, two Japanese engineers named Fujiyama and Aoji, and Jack's son Leonard Tramiel, who helped design

968-613: A different fashion than the 8096. While on the 8096, the expansion RAM cannot be accessed at all without switching out the OS ROMs and video RAM, the 8296 has a setup closer to that of the Commodore 64 where writing to the memory locations with the OS ROMs accesses the RAM underneath, but reading from those locations will read back the ROMs instead. The 8296 also differs from the 8096 in that it has jumpers on

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1056-504: A different video controller than the 2001/3000 models. This created a notorious compatibility problem known as the killer poke . On 2001/3000 PETs, there was a register which when enabled did not allow reading/writing of the video RAM except during the vertical blanking in order to prevent snow on the screen, caused by the CPU and video controller trying to access the VRAM at the same time. This feature

1144-691: A division of Seiko Group, produces Seiko timepieces in-house through its subsidiaries as well as delegates the manufacture of some of its high-end watches (Seiko Astron, Grand Seiko, Credor, etc) to Epson. The company makes some of Seiko's highest-grade watches at the Micro Artist Studio inside its Shiojiri Plant in Shiojiri , Nagano . Beside Seiko timepieces, Epson develops, designs, manufactures, markets, and sells watches under its own brands such as Trume, Orient , and Orient Star. In 2004, Epson introduced their R-D1 (the first digital rangefinder camera on

1232-424: A lower total cost of production. These companies began to undercut TI business, so TI responded by entering the calculator market directly in 1975. As a result, TI was selling complete calculators at lower price points than they sold just the chipset to their former customers, and the industry that had built up around it was frozen out of the market. Commodore initially responded by beginning their own attempt to form

1320-492: A marketplace flop and also very expensive to manufacture. Because Commodore still had a strong business software market in Europe, the 80xx series PET was revived during 1984 in a new molded plastic case with a swivel monitor. Four models were offered, the 8032SK, 8096SK, and the new 8296 and 8296-D. The 8296 models had 128K of memory (96K on the expansion memory board) and the 8296-D had two internal half-height 8250 drives. In addition,

1408-464: A number of programming languages including a BASIC in ROM for the 6502 and a separate ANSI Minimal BASIC-compatible BASIC for the 6809, along with APL , COBOL , FORTRAN , Pascal and a 6809 assembler on floppies. It also included microEDITOR, a text editor for use in writing and maintaining programs for any of the 6809 languages. Also included was a terminal program which allowed the machine to be used as

1496-459: A one byte sector–header size difference makes the formats write-incompatible). 8050 and 8250 drives had an incompatible higher density 500 KB / 1 MB format, but were popular well into the 1980s as server/ BBS storage devices because of their large capacity. In addition, Commodore had 8-inch 8060, 8061, 8062, and 8280 drives which used MFM encoding instead of the GCR used on their other disk drives and

1584-460: A programming point of view, this was a relatively simple method of producing good-looking graphics, which used negligibly more RAM than a standard character display, and significantly less RAM than bitmap graphics. The PET's lack of a remappable character set is a major weakness in the machine's design. Somewhat offsetting this drawback, the PET's ROM-restricted character set – an ASCII-1963 deviation known as PETSCII  –

1672-787: A retail environment. Reps were assigned on weekend shifts, typically around 12–20 hours a week. Epson started the Weekend Warrior program with TMG Marketing (now Mosaic Sales Solutions), and later with Keystone Marketing Inc, then returned to Mosaic, and switched again to Campaigners Inc. on June 24, 2007 after the Mosaic contract expired. The sales reps of Campaigners, Inc. are not outsourced; Epson hired rack jobbers to ensure retailers displayed products properly, freeing up its regular sales force to concentrate on profitable sales solutions to value-added resellers and system integrators, leaving "retail" to reps who did not require sales skills. Epson entered

1760-617: A series of models with more memory, better keyboard, larger screen, and other modifications. The systems were a top seller in the Canadian and United States education markets, as well as for business use in Europe. The PET line was discontinued in 1982 after approximately 219,000 machines were sold. In the 1970s, Commodore was one of many electronics companies selling calculators designed around Texas Instruments (TI) chips. TI faced increasing competition from Japanese vertically integrated companies who were using new CMOS -based processors and had

1848-411: A standard feature on the 8096. A register at $ FFF0 is used to set the RAM configuration. The extra RAM is banked in four 16K blocks, the first two blocks are switched into $ 8000 – $ BFFF and the second two in $ C000 – $ FFFF . Normally, banking in the expansion RAM will swap out the video RAM, I/O registers, and system ROMs, so interrupts must be turned off first, but it is also possible to set

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1936-466: A variation on the PET called "Teacher's PET" – these were relabeled 2001-series PETs which were donated by Commodore as part of a "buy 2, get 1 free" program offered to schools as part of a promotion/ tax write-off scheme. Two more machines were released in the PET series. The 8000 series included a new display chip which drove an 80×25 character screen, but this resulted in a number of software incompatibilities with programs designed for

2024-594: A vertically integrated calculator line as well, purchasing a vendor in California that was working on a competitive CMOS calculator chip and an LED production line. They also went looking for a company with an existing calculator chip line, something to tide them over in the immediate term, and this led them to MOS Technology . MOS had been building calculator chips for some time, but more recently had begun to branch out into new markets with its 6502 microprocessor design, which they were trying to bring to market. Along with

2112-578: A video controller based on the Motorola 6845 CRTC chip (unlike the TTL logic circuit in 2001/3000s/early 4000s) that eliminated the snow problem, but also placed a CRT control register in place of where the VBLANK flag had been on the 2001/3000. BASIC programs intended for the 2001/3000 thus had to be modified in order to run safely on 12-inch PETs. Later machines had modified video circuitry to prevent killer poke damage;

2200-403: Is a line of personal computers produced starting in 1977 by Commodore International . A single all-in-one case combines a MOS Technology 6502 microprocessor , Commodore BASIC in read-only memory , keyboard, monochrome monitor, and, in early models, a cassette deck . Development of the system began in 1976, and it was demonstrated and sold as the first personal computer for the masses at

2288-576: The Amiga , one of their conditions was that Commodore credit the original authors of BASIC, so BASIC 7.0 on the Commodore 128 displayed a Microsoft copyright notice). This feature was present in all 30xx series PETs. Commodore executives were unhappy when they learned about it and it was removed from BASIC on all subsequent Commodore machines. Microsoft also remained sensitive about their copyrighted code and pressured Commodore to not release any BASIC code listings to

2376-636: The Apple II (which shipped in June 1977), Atari 400/800 (1979), and, in particular, Commodore's own bestselling VIC-20 (1980/81). Commodore released a High Resolution Graphic board for the PET using the Thomson EF936x graphics chip with a resolution of 512×512 pixels. In addition, the Apple II, TRS-80 Model I , and Atari 400 (via 3rd party expansions)/800 could all be expanded to a maximum of 48 KB of RAM while

2464-573: The Commodore 128 , 1571 , and 1581 . Although not officially a member of the PET series, in 1983 Commodore packaged C64 motherboards in plastic cases similar to the PET 4000-series in order to create the Educator 64 . This was an attempt to retake some of the education market they had largely lost by then to the Apple IIe . In the home computer market, the PET line was soon outsold by machines that supported high-resolution color graphics and sound, mainly

2552-472: The PETSCII graphic characters and acted as quality control. The result was Commodore's first mass-market personal computer, the PET, the first model of which was the PET 2001. Its 6502 processor controlled the screen, keyboard, cassette tape recorders and any peripherals connected to one of the computer's several expansion ports. The PET 2001 included either 4 KB (2001-4) or 8 KB (2001-8) of 8-bit RAM , and

2640-661: The Seiko Group when they became the official time-keepers for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic games and needed a machine that could print out times they gathered from their time-pieces. In 1975, Shinshu Seiki began branding printers as EPSON. The brand name comes from the next generation version of this printer – son of EP , or EP-son. Shinshu Seiki renamed Epson Corporation in 1982 and was merged with Suwa Seikosha to form Seiko Epson Corporation in 1985. Shinshu Seiki Co. The company has developed as one of manufacturing and research and development (formerly known as Seikosha ) of

2728-585: The Spring Drive watch movement in 1999. The watch business is the root of the company's ultra-precision machining and micromechatronics technologies and still a major business for Seiko Epson, although it accounts for a low percentage of total revenues. Watches made by the company are sold through the Seiko Watch Corporation, a subsidiary of Seiko Group. The watch brand Orient Watch , also known as Orient Star, has been owned by Epson since 2009 and

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2816-606: The 1st section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange . Since 2017, the company is a constituent of the Nikkei Stock Average index. Although Seiko Group Corporation ( f/k/a K. Hattori, Hattori Seiko, and Seiko Holdings) and the key members of the Hattori family still hold approximately 10% of the outstanding shares of Seiko Epson, the company is managed and operated completely independently from Seiko Group. Seiko Watch Corporation,

2904-405: The 2001-N (the N was short for "New"). The new machine used a standard green- phosphor monitor in place of the white in the original 2001. It now had a conventional, full-sized keyboard and no longer sported the built-in cassette recorder. The kernel ROM was upgraded to add support for Commodore's newly introduced disk drive line. It was offered in 8 KB, 16 KB, or 32 KB models as

2992-463: The 2001-N-8, the 3008 was quickly dropped. Later PET 3000 series machines switched to the BASIC 4.0 ROMs. In 1980, the 4000-series PETs were launched. These included the enhanced BASIC 4.0, which added commands for disk functions and significantly improved garbage cleanup. By this point, Commodore discovered that people were buying cheaper 8 KB and 16 KB models of the 3000-series and upgrading

3080-416: The 2001-N8, 2001-N16, and 2001-N32 (the 8 KB models were dropped soon after introduction). The 2001-N switched to using conventional DRAM instead of the 6550 (1kx4) SRAM in the original model. PET 2001-8Ns had eight 2108 (8kx1) DRAMs and 2001-16Ns used sixteen 2108s. The PET 4016 used eight 4116 (16kx1) chips. All 32K PETs used sixteen 4116 chips. Finally, Commodore added a machine-language monitor to

3168-444: The 40 column screen, and it appears to have been unpopular as a result. Unlike the 30xx series, the 40xx and 80xx PETs came standard with a 1-channel speaker for sound generation. 2001/3000 and 4000-series PETs used what became known as the "graphics keyboard". Numbers were exclusively on the numeric keypad and the row above the alphabet keys had only punctuation symbols. The 3032 and 4032 were produced in two special variants known as

3256-439: The 6502 came Chuck Peddle 's KIM-1 design (short for "Keyboard Input Monitor") in January of 1976, a small computer kit based on the 6502. At Commodore, Peddle had long dreamed of making computers and convinced Jack Tramiel that calculators were a dead-end and that Commodore should explore the burgeoning microcomputer market instead. At first, they considered purchasing an existing design, and in September 1976 Peddle asked for

3344-477: The 8096, the video RAM and I/O registers can be set to "peek" through. The motherboard also sported "user" jumpers which "connected" the RAM banking to the user port, these required soldering to enable. If connected, the user port could be used to adjust the upper memory configuration via software. The IEEE-488–based PET disk drive line was also updated; the large, heavy metal-cased drives were replaced by smaller units in 1541 cases; they looked almost identical to

3432-446: The 8296 came bundled with an office suite on disk and the system ROMs included a menu program to launch each of its four applications. Early units contained leftover 8032/96 PCBs in order to get rid of remaining stock; after these were used up, Commodore equipped the machines with a new PCB that replaced the old triple-voltage 4116 DRAMs with more modern types. The 8296 had a completely redesigned motherboard and handled expansion RAM in

3520-405: The B models with the so-called "business keyboard", which had a conventional layout with mathematical symbols and numbers above the alphabet keys. The keypad contained only numerals. On the other hand, all 8000-series PETs sported the business layout. Entering graphics symbols on PETs with the business keyboard proved something of a challenge since they could not be directly typed out and usually it

3608-511: The January 1977 Consumer Electronics Show . The name "PET" was suggested by Andre Souson after he saw the Pet Rock in Los Gatos , and stated they were going to make the "pet computer". It was backronymed to Personal Electronic Transactor . Byte referred to the PET, Apple II and Tandy TRS-80 collectively as the "1977 trinity". Following the initial PET 2001, the design was updated through

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3696-701: The Micro Piezo inkjet technology, which used a piezoelectric crystal in each nozzle and did not heat the ink at the print head while spraying it onto the page, and released the Epson MJ-500 inkjet cartridge for the Epson Stylus 800 printer in March 1993. Shortly after in 1994, Epson released the first 720 dpi colour inkjet printer, the Epson Stylus Color (P860A) utilizing the Micro Piezo head technology. Newer models of

3784-522: The PCB to select the power-on memory configuration for $ 8000 - $ FFFF . The factory default configuration was to have the I/O registers, video RAM, and ROMs occupying $ 8000 – $ FFFF . When operating from BASIC, the machine would be nearly indistinguishable from an 8032. By setting the jumpers, one could swap out any 8K region of upper memory for RAM, and it was even possible to have everything switched out and convert

3872-466: The PET 2001/3000, but in 1981 this was replaced by the 12-inch screen and 6845-based CRTC hardware. The PET's simple, rugged design and completely enclosed components made it an early favorite in the North American education market. Schools preferred the 40-column models because the 40-column display's larger characters vs. the 80xx PETs were easier for young children to read. Commodore manufactured

3960-499: The PET was limited to 32 KB. Without the High Resolution Graphic board, the PET's graphics capabilities were limited to a character set hardwired in ROM , similar to the Apple II in text mode. On many of the PET range's home computer rivals, the look-up address of the character graphics could be changed and pointed to RAM , where new characters could be defined by a programmer to create custom graphics shapes. From

4048-540: The PET were the single-unit 2031 and dual-unit 2040, 3040. Then followed the 4040, 8050, and 8250. Later (near the end of the PET's lifespan), single-unit 2031 and SFD-1001 drives were produced that used the same case as the 1540/1541, but sported the PET's parallel interface instead of the VIC-20/C64 IEC serial interface. The 4040/2031 used the same 170 KB format as the 1541 and is read compatible (although software that performs low-level drive access will not work, and

4136-548: The R-D1 up to the full functionality of its successor, being the first digital camera manufacturer to make such an upgrade available for free. In September 2012, Epson introduced a printer called the Expression Premium XP-800 Small-in-One, with the ability to print wirelessly. The Expression brand name has since been used on various models of scanners. In the third quarter of 2012, Epson's global market share in

4224-424: The RAM rather than paying extra for the 32 KB model. Because of this, they punched out the memory sockets in the 4008 and 4016 to prevent that practice. The 4032 was a major success in schools, where its tough all-metal construction and all-in-one design made it better able to stand up to the rigors of classroom use. Just as important in this role was the PET's otherwise underutilized IEEE-488 port. Used wisely,

4312-627: The Stylus series employed Epson's special DURABrite ink and used two hard drives (an HD 850 and an HD 860). In 1994, Epson started to outsource sales representatives to help sell their products in retail stores in the United States. The same year, they started the Epson Weekend Warrior sales program. The purpose of the program was to help improve sales, improve retail sales reps' knowledge of Epson products, and to address Epson customer service in

4400-540: The Suwa Factory was split up and merged into Daiwa Kogyo to form Suwa Seikosha Co., Ltd: the forerunner of the Seiko Epson Corporation. The company has developed many timepiece technologies, such as the world's first portable quartz timer (Seiko QC-951) in 1963, the world's first quartz watch ( Seiko Quartz Astron 35SQ ) in 1969, the first automatic power-generating quartz watch (Seiko Auto-Quartz) in 1988, and

4488-449: The U.S., said Epson. In 2015, it emerged that Epson printers reported cartridges to be empty when in fact up to 20% of their ink remains. As in 2003, the company responded: The ink reporting and ink cartridges used in Epson's Stylus Pro 9900-series large format printer reports on ink levels and simultaneously protect the health of the printhead . During printhead maintenance or cleanings, if

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4576-444: The US market in part because the 6502-based PETs could not run CP/M , which had become the standard for business software. In addition, the PET's 32 KB of memory was a disadvantage against the Apple II and TRS-80, both of which could accommodate 48 KB . The 8000-series PETs had a motherboard connector for a daughterboard that added an additional 64K of RAM for 96K total; this was

4664-643: The best selling printer in the United States . In July 1982, Shinshu Seiki officially named itself the Epson Corporation and launched the world's first handheld computer, the HX-20 (HC-20), and in May 1983, the world's first portable colour LCD TV was developed and launched by the company. In November 1985, Suwa Seikosha Co., Ltd. and the Epson Corporation merged to form Seiko Epson Corporation. The company developed

4752-479: The cartridge slots on later Commodore machines, they allowed various software add-ons such as machine language monitors. In addition, it was common for commercial programs to include a copy protection ROM that had to be installed prior to running the application; something of an inconvenience to users owning multiple applications protected in this way, as the chips would have to be swapped in order to run their respective programs. The original lineup of disk drives for

4840-443: The choice of either mixed-case characters, or uppercase with graphics; either could also be displayed as a reverse field, negative image. For specialized applications, alternative character sets could be programmed into an EPROM inserted in the character set ROM socket. Alternative character set EPROMs with diacritics and mathematical symbols were available in the aftermarket. A 2001-8B model with katakana keyboard and character set

4928-444: The computer). On the original PET 2001, the uppercase/graphics character set and upper/lowercase character set were reversed compared to how they would be on later machines; PET owners who upgraded their machines to the BASIC 2.0 ROMs often also swapped out the character ROMs for the newer version. Although the machine was moderately successful, there were frequent complaints about the tiny calculator-like keyboard, often referred to as

5016-478: The entire $ 8000 – $ FFFF to RAM, although such a machine would be useless with no I/O or system ROMs accessible. Like with the 8096, the user could also manipulate the register at $ FFF0 to control which RAM banks occupied upper memory. The 8296's RAM is banked in 16K chunks like the 8096, although since it has 128K, there are six possible banks instead of four, three that can go into $ 8000 – $ BFFF and three that can go into $ C000 – $ FFFF , and like with

5104-556: The former Seiko Group , a name traditionally known for manufacturing Seiko timepieces . Seiko Epson was one of the major companies in the Seiko Group, but is neither a subsidiary nor an affiliate of Seiko Group Corporation. The roots of Seiko Epson Corporation go back to a company called Daiwa Kogyo, Ltd. which was founded in May 1942 by Hisao Yamazaki, a local clock shop owner and former employee of K. Hattori , in Suwa, Nagano . Daiwa Kogyo

5192-423: The kernal contained screen editor functions (the screen editor on 80 column PETs differed from 40-column models) with the second half containing a number of function calls for tasks such as inputting and outputting data to and from different I/O devices, reading the keyboard, and positioning the cursor. In addition, the kernal ROM received system interrupts and scanned the keyboard. The kernel, an idea of John Feagans,

5280-460: The kernel ROM that could be accessed by jumping to any memory location with a BRK instruction. It did not include a built-in assembler and required the user to enter hexadecimal numbers for coding. Commodore contacted Microsoft to upgrade BASIC for the new machines; this resulted in the soon-to-be-familiar BASIC 2.0 which removed the 256 element array limitation and had a rearranged zero page . Most bugs were fixed and IEEE-488 support in BASIC

5368-569: The latter of which is an enterprise oriented, upgraded version of the BT-200 with stereoscopic cameras. The company also was the first to release consumer smartglasses with transparent optics, which were popular with drone pilots for providing a first-person view while still being able to see the drone in the sky. In 2016, Epson presented the large-format SureColor SC-P10000 ink printer; it prints with inks in ten colours on paper up to 44 inches (1.1 m) wide. To control its printers, Epson introduced

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5456-426: The market while the PET had a full-featured BASIC with floating-point support , a sophisticated screen editor, and lowercase letters, the last being a feature that the two competing platforms would not have for a few years. On the other hand, Commodore were a year behind Apple and Tandy in making disk drives available for their computers. In 1979, Commodore replaced the original PET 2001 with an improved model known as

5544-514: The market), which supports the Leica M mount and Leica M39 mount lenses with an adapter ring. Because its sensor is smaller than that of the standard 35 mm film frame, lenses mounted on the R-D1 have a field of view 1.53 times as wide as that of the standard 35 mm camera. In 2006, the R-D1 was replaced by the R-D1s, a cheaper version with identical hardware. Epson has released a firmware patch to bring

5632-565: The personal computer market in 1983 with the QX-10 , a CP/M -compatible Z80 machine. By 1986, the company had shifted to the growing PC market with the Equity line. EPSON manufactured and sold NEC PC-9801 clones in Japan. Epson withdrew from the international PC market in 1996. The company still produces and sells PCs in Japan as of 2024. In June 2003, the company became public following their listing on

5720-405: The port could be used as a simple local area network and allowed printers and disk drives (which were then very expensive) to be shared among all of the machines in the classroom. Unlike later Commodore machines, PETs had no kernel ROM functions for the IEEE-488 port and users had to write their own to use peripherals such as modems. First year 4000-series PETs retained the same video hardware as

5808-402: The production of robots. In July 2003, a Netherlands -based consumer association advised its 640,000 members to boycott Epson inkjet printers. The organisation alleged that Epson customers were unfairly charged for ink they could never use. Later that month, however, the group retracted its call for a nationwide boycott and issued a statement conceding that residual ink left in Epson cartridges

5896-451: The public, although user groups eventually made disassemblies of BASIC. Sales of the newer machines were strong, and Commodore then introduced the models to Europe. However, Philips owned a competing trademark on the PET name, so these models were renamed. The result was the CBM 3000 series ('CBM' standing for Commodore Business Machines), which included the 3008 , 3016 and 3032 models. Like

5984-640: The sale of printers, copiers and multifunction devices amounted to 15.20 percent. In September 2015, Epson debuted the ET-4550 printer, which enables the user to pour ink into separate inkwells from ink bottles instead of cartridges. Epson is also involved in the smartglasses market. Since 2016, the company has three different models: the Moverio BT-100, the Moverio BT-200, and the Moverio Pro BT-2000,

6072-601: The same year, Epson America Inc. was established to sell printers for Shinshu Seiki Co. In June 1978, the TX-80 (TP-80) , an eighty-column dot matrix printer , was released to the market and was mainly used as a system printer for the Commodore PET computer. After two years of further development, an improved model, the MX-80 (MP-80), was launched in October 1980. It was soon advertised as

6160-501: The screen flickered while using the IEEE-488 port, the 16K and 32K models had this feature removed. The last in the series was the SP9000, known as the SuperPET or MicroMainframe. This machine was designed at the University of Waterloo for teaching programming. In addition to the basic CBM 8000 hardware, the 9000 added a second CPU in the form of the Motorola 6809 , more RAM and included

6248-463: The video RAM and I/O registers to "peek" through. Regardless, switching the OS ROMs out will require the user to either have interrupts disabled or supply their own interrupt handler. The expansion RAM cannot be seen by BASIC and machines equipped with the RAM board will still report the standard 31,743 bytes free on power up. A relatively small amount of software could utilize it. As noted above, 8000-series PETs (and later 4000s) used larger monitors and

6336-511: The world's first mini-printer, the EP-101 ("EP" for Electronic Printer), which was soon incorporated into many calculators. In June 1975, the name Epson was coined for the next generation of printers based on the EP-101, which was released to the public. The Epson name was coined by joining the initials EP (Electronic Printer) and the word son , making "Epson" mean "Electronic Printer's Son". In April of

6424-486: Was 1500 baud , but the data was recorded to tape twice for safety, giving an effective rate of 750 baud. The computer's main board carried four expansion ports: extra memory, a second cassette tape recorder interface, a parallel ("user") port which could be used for sound output or connection to "user" projects or non-Commodore devices and a parallel IEEE-488 port which allowed for daisy-chaining peripherals such as disk drives and printers. A working PET 2001 prototype

6512-452: Was broken, so that when Commodore later came out with disk drives, they could not be used from BASIC (although the kernel routines supported them), and only supported 256 array elements. The PEEK function would not work on memory locations above 49152 so as to prevent the user from viewing the copyrighted code in the system ROMs . Aside from the 8K BASIC ROM, the PET also included a 4K character ROM and an 8K kernal ROM. The first half of

6600-487: Was essentially a single-board computer with discrete logic driving a small built-in monochrome monitor with 40×25 character graphics, enclosed in a sheet metal case that reflected Commodore's background as a manufacturer of office equipment . The machine also included a built-in Datasette for data storage located on the front of the case, which left little room for the keyboard. The data transfer rate to cassette tape

6688-474: Was fully integrated into the company in 2017. In 1961, Suwa Seikosha established a company called Shinshu Seiki Co. as a subsidiary to supply precision parts for Seiko watches. When Seiko was selected to be the official time keeper for the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, a printing timer was required to time events, and Shinshu Seiki started developing an electronic printer. In September 1968, Shinshu Seiki launched

6776-418: Was made to be functional. The PEEK function was unblocked for memory locations above 49152. BASIC 2.0 also included an easter egg that Bill Gates personally coded, which would cause "MICROSOFT!" to appear if the user typed WAIT 6502,x (x being the number of times to display the message); this was reportedly due to a dispute with Commodore over ownership of BASIC (years later, when Microsoft developed BASIC for

6864-449: Was necessary for the printers to function properly. Epson designed ink to be left in the cartridges (having done so ever since the introduction of piezoelectric print heads) due to the way the capping mechanism worked. If the capping mechanism dries out, then the heads risk getting clogged, necessitating expensive repairs. The reason that the Dutch consumer association retracted their statement

6952-540: Was necessary to display them indirectly via a CHR$ function. The 4000/8000 PETs were more explicitly targeted at professional/business use than the 2001/3000. Business customers were the main target for the features of the enhanced BASIC 4.0, and a good selection of prepackaged business software was available. A large line of 5.25-inch and 8-inch floppy drives were made for the PET family, and even 5 and 7 MB external hard disks . While they became fairly popular for business use in Europe, they failed to make much impact on

7040-402: Was one of the most varied and flexible of the era. It allowed PET games with rudimentary graphics to be created, exemplified by clones of video games such as Space Invaders and Lunar Lander . The PETSCII character set was even flexible enough to allow for the creation of simple 3D games such as Labyrinth . This flexibility was achieved by the use of two switchable character sets, allowing

7128-577: Was saved by Apple's decision to license Microsoft BASIC for the Apple II line. The BASIC included on the original PET 2001 was known as Commodore BASIC 1.0; Microsoft supplied Commodore with a source listing for their 6502 BASIC, essentially a port of BASIC-80, and Commodore performed the rest of the work themselves, including changing the startup screen and prompts, adding I/O support, the SYS command for invoking machine language programs, and fixing bugs . BASIC 1.0 still had numerous bugs and IEEE-488 support

7216-509: Was shown to the public at the Winter CES 1977 in January 1977, and the first hundred units were shipped in October, mostly going to magazines and software developers, while the machine was not generally available to consumers until December. However, the PET was back-ordered for months, so to ease deliveries, early in 1978, Commodore decided to cancel the 4 KB version (also because the user would be left with barely 3 KB of RAM). Commodore

7304-535: Was sold in Japan. In 2012, Commodore enthusiast Steve Gray began a project to convert the Commodore PET to colour. This involves upgrading a 4032 machine or downgrading an 8032 machine. The result is 16 colours for foreground and background, The colour RAM is located at $ 8800 which is not used in regular PET machines. Colour PET emulation is available in the newer versions of the Vice Emulator software. Other than

7392-570: Was supported by an investment from the Hattori family (founder of the Seiko Group) and began as a manufacturer of watch parts for Daini Seikosha (currently Seiko Instruments ). The company started operation in a 230-square-metre (2,500 sq ft) renovated miso storehouse with 22 employees. In 1943, Daini Seikosha established a factory in Suwa for manufacturing Seiko watches with Daiwa Kogyo. In 1959,

7480-581: Was that, as pointed out, Epson had made a statement regarding how many pages (at usually a 5% coverage of an A4 sheet of paper ) each cartridge could sustain for printing. Nonetheless, Epson America, Inc. settled a class action lawsuit brought before the Los Angeles Superior Court . It did not admit guilt, but agreed to refund $ 45 to anyone who purchased an Epson inkjet printer after April 8, 1999 (at least $ 20 of which must be used at Epson's e-Store). According to IDG News Service , Epson filed

7568-401: Was the first company to license Microsoft 's 6502 BASIC, but the agreement nearly drove Microsoft into receivership as Commodore stipulated that they would only pay for it when the PET began shipping. This was delayed by over six months, during which Microsoft lost money and had their cash reserves further depleted by a lawsuit over ownership of Altair BASIC. At the end of the year, Microsoft

7656-456: Was the first personal computer OS ROM to be a distinct entity from BASIC. The character ROM was 4K in size, containing four different 128 character tables, the uppercase/graphics character set and upper/lowercase character set, plus reverse video versions of both. This included a number of graphics characters for creating pseudographics on the screen as well as playing card symbols (reportedly because Jack Tramiel's sons wanted to play card games on

7744-470: Was used because of the extremely slow 6550 SRAMs in the PET 2001, although it ceased to be a problem on 3000-series PETs since they used faster 2114 SRAMs for the video memory instead. Ordinarily, this feature was enabled on power-up. If the user did not mind snow, they could turn it off and get faster text output. BASIC programs and some machine-language software commonly did this for performance reasons. PETs with 12-inch displays (all 8000s and later 4000s) used

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