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These are pictures of Chuck Peddle's TOI (The Other Intellect) computer prototype. These pictures come from the personal collection of Michael Tomczyk, who was Jack Tramiel's assistant and also Marketing strategist.
Michael had this to say:
Note the photo of Chuck Peddle with the prototype on the table in front of him from the April 1 [1980] meeting, and the prototype itself. The 2 pictures of me are the only photos that show me arguing for the new home computer. I was so passionate about this concept that I made a spirited argument in favor of the concept, because it rounded out Commodore's product mix - also, my job title was Assistant to the President and I had a second official title as "Marketing Strategist" so I saw this as part of the company's long term market strategy.
Jack and I felt at the time that getting computers into the home would not only make them affordable for poor kids and schools but would start a chain of ownership that started with the VIC-20, continued with the P.E.T. in school, and followed through with CBM business computers and this was the "full life cycle strategy" we were developing.
The case does resemble the Apple II machines very much, but it also shows its PET roots with a little of the wooden PET prototype as well. There appears to be an access panel on the top, much like the Apple II case, so it appears the computer was planned to be expandable to some degree. The keyboard is a mystery. If you look closely you can see the top row is mostly symbols, but also we have the INS/DEL and CURSOR keys. In fact you see TWO UP/DOWN and TWO LEFT/RIGHT keys. No doubt this is an early mockup keyboard and they just didn't have the proper keycaps yet (you can see an extra INS/DEL key at the bottom right as well, so it's likely they just used a couple of PET keyboards and took whatever keys were available. Also notice the odd spacing of the keys. If you look at the 2nd and 3rd rows from the top, they have the same number of keys on each, yet even with the bigger OFF/RVS key on one row the keys mysteriously line up on both sides.
My guess is the top row of keys would be for function keys. The 4 cursor keys were probably intended to have one arrow on each (like the C128 keyboard). Perhaps one INS/DEL key might have become an ESC key or something similar. You'll also notice the lack of some important keys like $,%,!, and backarrow. We can assume those might be placed as shifted characters on the number keys. Again, this prototype must have been so early that the final keyboard layout was not yet fixed.
Looking at the back the picture doesn't give many clues. Are we seeing 3 a/v connectors, or perhaps the beginnings of the IEC bus? Hard to say.
Additional information can be by following the links below:
Page Created: Jun 10/2013. Last updated: Jun 10/2013, 2:00pm EST
Send comments or feedback to Steve Gray(sjgray@rogers.com)