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I cut my teeth on that language, and still keep a Commodore PET around for old times sake.

I had my Commodore PET for 10 years from 1977 to 1987 until I went away and my cousin borrowed it, and then believing I was not coming back to the US from Spain, sold it!

I loved the cassette drive and all-in-one chassis. Ah, typing in programs from magazines and creating programs from scratch with PET graphics on the keys! I miss those days. So much wonder and fun.

And recording software applications to cassette off the radio!

I never did that! Beats typing it in, but then again, I memorized the formula for creating a planar view of the 4 major moons of Jupiter at a given time by programming it all in PET Basic!

I did self-learned programming on an PET with the half-sized keyboard and cassette deck at highschool starting 1980. After 3 weeks or so I had filled the 7 KB of memory and needed to optimize GOTO commands by rearrangign the code. Every digit in the line number took 1 Byte, so many GOTO 20000 were wasteful. The trick to reveal the Microsoft text was known, but nobody knew what company that was. The PC did not exist yet.

My next step was Pascal on a VAX at Uni. Never looked back to PET or Microsoft. Linux user today.

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