The PET 8000

PET 8000: The first PET to be released with an 80 colum screen was the PET 8032. It came standard with 32KB of RAM which could be expanded to 96KB with an additional board.

Later Commodore would release the 8096-SK which had the expanded RAM as standard and a variant called the 8296 which had two internal floppy drives. This machine was the first PET to feature a detachable keyboard and a monitor with tilt and swivel. It was taken from the cancelled CBM-II series.

The 8xxx series were the models that suffered from the infamous "killer poke".

There was a very rare 96KB model produced for Sweden called the PET200. This had a Swedish character set and was sold in only two stores. Only seven machines are known to exist and they are all equipped differently to each other. This may well be the rarest Commodore computer.

One other variant was created in early 1980 - the PET 3320. Ric Rainbolt states "This was a customised 8032 that was developed into a cash register. The custom motherboard featured 32K of battery-backed CMOS RAM instead of the normal DRAM, and instead of one 4K ROM, it had seven. The unit carried a built-in 9" green screen alongside an Epson 522 retail receipt printer, and a 160-plus key Point of Sale keyboard. The extra ROMs were based on the stock Kernal, but additionally carried on-board routines for driving the monitor and printer and maintaining the CMOS RAM. The reason for the battery-backed RAM, of course, was to make the machine resistant to power failures and allowing it to resume normal operation when power was restored without data loss. The internal printer and the other PoS hardware were driven by the "Magic Board," an internal daughterboard with a 6504? CPU and its own ROM and interfacing logic, bolted to the inside roof of the CCR's heavy steel case." The project although successful was killed off in 1982 by Jack Tramiel. This was one of the world's earliest Point of Sales systems. It may have resurfaced four years later as the Commodore Multi User Cash Terminal although little is known about this shadowy machine. (Information on these two items from http://www.floodgap.com/retrobits/ckb/secret/)