Imagine, if you will, what the computing environment for undergraduate computer science courses at Waterloo looked like in the 1970s: before PCs and desktop systems, before Ethernet, and before the general availability of timesharing systems.
That’s right – punch-cards, printouts, and “cafeteria” computing.
But at the end of the 1970s the fledgling personal computer industry was showing promise. Wes Graham, Director of the University’s Computer Systems Group (CSG), former Director of the Computer Centre (the forerunner to IST) and Professor of Computer Science, sought to find a way to exploit these newfangled personal computers in the undergraduate curriculum.
The result of the efforts by CSG, in collaboration with Commodore Business Machines Inc., was the Commodore SuperPET, an enhanced Commodore PET featuring a second CPU, a collection of hardware and firmware enhancements and a suite of programming language software packages designed for use in first- and second-year computer courses. Concurrent with the development of the SuperPET was the Northern Digital Inc. (NDI) microWAT, a “headless” hardware platform featuring the same software as the SuperPET.
This talk is a retrospective on the development of the SuperPET by Trevor Grove, who was a staff member at the CSG during the development of the SuperPET (he was the principal author of the platform’s Pascal interpreter), and other developments in the early days of desktop computing at Waterloo. The talk will include a demonstration of one of the few remaining functional SuperPETs.
Speaker: Trevor Grove
Time: 2:00-2:45 p.m.
Location: STC 0050