<img attachment="pet2001.jpg" align="left" class="frame" caption="Commodore PET 2001">The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_pet" source="Wikipedia">Commodore PET</a> first came onto the scene in 1977. Why is that interesting? As with most disciplines and careers, programmers like to engage in pissing contests to determine who's suffered the most under the least expressive language under the most oppressive OS on the most restrictive hardware. One of the most important markers of experience is the "first machine I ever programmed on" metric. Many cut their teeth on BASIC on the Commodore 64; I cut mine on the machine to the left. Until Wikipedia and the glorious Internets brought it back into sharp focus, the PET hovered fuzzily in memory as only a name (without a manufacturer), an achingly slow tape drive and scrolling lines of green text on a black screen. It turns out that the PET was also manufactured by Commodore---and several years before the Commodore 64 was even created. It understood a pretty basic BASIC, for which our 8- and 9-year-old minds wrote "Choose Your Own Adventure" GI Joe stories. Sadly, the sands of time have worn away these masterpieces, drifting them under the dunes of an obsolescent file format on lost media for which no reader exists. In that way, old-school programmers have another advantage over the young whippersnappers of today: if we're lucky, all evidence of anything less than a complete mastery of computing has been mercifully lost to the unreachable past, leaving only a gleaming legacy of perfect code.