Commodore Advert - October 1983

Released in 1983, the 8296 was the last of the PET line - the world's first personal computer, which had been first shown at Chicago CES in January 1977.

Commodore had already tried to update its PET line with the release of its 700 series computers, otherwise known as the "B" Series in the US, or sometimes the CBM-II series.

These machines were not especially successful, although the design - often mis-attributed to Ferdinand Porsche - was popular, and so it was re-used for the 8000-series models - the top-of-the-range 8296D is show here in this nice gate-fold sales brochure.

"The Commodore 8296 for your business" - more from the 8296's sales brochure

The 8296 was originally nothing more than an 8032 (80-column 32K PET) motherboard shoved into the new case, although later versions did get a new motherboard^[1]. According to the brochure, this updated board made use of a Sinclair-style "reduced chip count" to "take advantage of new technology" and to give it greater reliability.

Because it was still fundamentally the same as the 1977 PET with an 80-column display and a bit more memory, but with the same 1MHz 6502 CPU, the 9296 still ran BASIC.

To compilcate things, there were actually three versions available: BASIC 2.0 and the 40- and 80-column version of BASIC 4.0. It also came with the cryptically-named DOS Wedge - a piece of machine-code software which made disk operations much simpler^[2].

According to the Centre for Computing History, not many 8296's were produced, and what there were only sold into Europe.