The original PETs shipped with a small manual, 5½ × 8½ inches in size, with 42 pages, of which four pages were blank and labeled "Notes".

The manual includes, amongst other things, instructions on cleaning and demagnetizing the cassette unit, instructions on how to locate bad memory chips, instructions on how to use the keyboard, pinouts for all of the external connectors, and a list of all of the BASIC commands and statements.

What more could a computer user need?