Will YouTube work on a computer that was released 44 years ago? A Commodore fan who asked himself this question succeeded in doing so in the Commodore PET, one of the milestones in computer history that has sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. So what does the result look like?
A Commodore fan named Thorbjörn Jemander managed to run YouTube on Commodore PET as part of a project he worked on for 8 months. Developing a special module for this, Jemander has made YouTube videos watchable on Commodore PET thanks to this module named BlixTerm. But of course, the image is much different from today’s screens.
What sets the Commodore PET apart is that it has a monochrome bright green CRT display capable of displaying a “huge” 80×25 text grid until then. Of course, it is possible to say that this screen is quite ugly by today’s standards, but it was an important value for the period. The PET 600’s screen was not only limited to displaying characters (letters, numbers, punctuation, etc.), but it was also quite slow. Powered by a 1 MHz MOS Technology 6502 processor, Commodore PET had a unit that supported monochrome character graphics as a graphics circuit. Of course, YouTube videos also look a bit strange on this screen. As we are familiar with from the movie Matrix, an image consisting of green characters emerges, which you can see in the video just below.
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