I actually wrote an inventory database from scratch on this thing in 1980, for the audio visual company I worked for at the time. Rental inventory was always in flux because equipment was shipped between cities as needed for large conventions. While technically each office owned it's own equipment, that gear could be scattered all over the country. This necessitated annual inventory counts that were tedious major pains in the ass. Normally it was done on paper with large ledgers. Everything had to be counted: From large items like projectors and speakers, to small items like lenses and power cords. No one looked forward to this, especially if it happened during a busy month.
I put my own trusty PET on a small rolling cart with a 400 foot extension cord, and we rolled it around the warehouse. My colleagues would call out serial numbers, descriptions, and originating cities. I would do the data entry. Everything was saved on cassette data tapes. I brought in my own dot matrix printer to print out all the results and then manually wrote it into the ledgers.
It made a bit of a stir because it allowed my Miami office to complete it's inventory count in record time. However, the Dallas home office thought we had fabricated our results and didn't believe we had used a personal computer. They sent a bunch of bean counters to our office for a week to look over my system, and eventually acknowledged that we had an accurate inventory. The home office, however, told us that in the future we had to do it the old fashioned way. They didn't see any possibility of personal computers ever being used in an office. LOL!
I did eventually buy the external dual 5-1/4 floppy drive in the picture below, which actually cost as much as the $800 computer itself, but it sure made life easier.
http://www.the8bitguy.com/4839/commodor ... odore-pet/
