The sweet spot for home turntable enthusiasts on a budget seems to be the $200 mark. This might be the best of the bunch.
One can only imagine the sake-fueled club hopping that led to the development of the Seiko Frequency drum machine watch.
Oddball Micros: The Commodore PET 64 'Frankenputer'
By James Grahame
I learned to program on an original Commodore PET 2001, and then grew up worshiping the Commodore 64. So what could be better than combining the two?
The PET was quite popular in schools because of its reasonable price and tank-like all-in-one design. Commodore tried to follow up by marketing the C64 in the educational market, but met with limited success because of its home-computerish dimensions and rats-nest of cabling.
Some clever soul at Commodore decided to combine the case and monitor from the PET 4000 series with a Commodore 64 motherboard. The resulting offspring was labeled the PET 64 (or Educator 64) and marketed to schools. They retained the 3-voice analog synthesizer (although it drove a tinny built-in speaker), and the C-64's beautiful color palette was rendered as varying shades of green.
I'd love to get my hands on one of these -- it would make a unique chipmusic synthesizer.
The C64 is Schoolbound... (Bo Zimmerman)
