Though named for and associated with the Toronto PET Users Group (TPUG),[1] the magazine was published independently of the club as a commercial enterprise with paid writers.

[2][3] Twenty-eight issues were produced for TPUG from November 1980 to August 1984.

[4] In 1984 TORPET's owner and editor, Bruce Beach, dissociated the publication from TPUG and relaunched it as an oceanography journal, backronymming its name to Today's Oceanographic Research Program for Education & Training.

[5] A 320-page anthology of The TORPET's most popular articles, The Best of The TORPET Plus More for the Commodore 64 and the VIC-20, was published in 1984 by Copp Clark Pitman.

It featured type-in listings for over a thousand freeware programs, articles and cartoon strips teaching BASIC and machine language programming, memory maps, and user documentation for popular public domain software.