TBH, my heart fluttered a bit when I saw the 2001 keyboard pictures. It was magic when I discovered the PET in the 80s.... I was a typical disengaged teen at school up until that point, and by next summer I PAID money out of my own pocket to take a course on 6502 Assembler taught by Steve Punter on the other side of Toronto in a public library basement. Awww, exciting nostalgia shooting directly into my veins :)
The original PET keyboard was a PITA to use, but it was nonetheless tremendously cool in its day mainly because of all the graphics symbols. It was the emoji keyboard of the time, except that the PET's symbols were composable in two dimensions to make awesome-looking (by the standards of the day) pictures. The integrated B&W CRT display was crisp and clean, because it was a direct connect and didn't have an RF modulator (which you needed to connect most computers of the day to a TV set). It resembled the Macintosh more than is commonly acknowledged.
Life was simpler then. Sometimes I miss those days.
A gloriously chicletty physical keyboard, up there with the "dead men's fingers" feel of the ZX Spectrum. Just typing on it made you feel like you were in some brutally-constructed space pirate's navigation pod.
Everyone remembers the PET for its iconic industrial design and chiclet keyboards but mustn't forget the integrated "mass storage" cassette tape player and recorder visible in the other images on that page.
I had a whole supply of cassette tapes that I bought somewhere with just 6 minutes of tape on the spools, for saving and loading of programs for the PET.
