The story
The Educator 64 was Commodore's way of getting the Commodore 64 into classrooms. Schools liked the C64's price but worried about its exposed, lightweight breadbin design, which was easy to damage or walk off with. Commodore's answer was to install C64 electronics inside the sturdy housing of its older PET computers, which many schools already owned, and to sell the result only to the education market.
The machine went by several names. Early units were called the PET 64 or CBM 4064, following the PET 4032 naming, and later ones the Educator 64. The earliest units had all-metal cases and weighed close to 20 kg, while most later Educators had a metal base with a heavy plastic top. Instead of plugging into a television, they had a built-in monitor, monochrome rather than colour on most units, with green screens on the Educator 64. They also added an internal speaker with a volume control and a headphone jack.
Underneath, it was a standard C64 with a 6510 processor, 64 KB of memory, the VIC-II and SID chips and BASIC 2.0. That compatibility had a catch: most C64 software was written with colour in mind and could be hard to use on a single-colour screen.
The Educator 64 was the final member of the PET line that had begun in 1977. Despite a low price, it sold poorly. American schools had largely settled on the Apple II, and the monochrome display made the machine less appealing than it should have been.