We would not be here were it not for DTSS

[Martin Brown]

On 05/02/2020 03:19, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:

onsdag den 5. februar 2020 kl. 04.00.08 UTC+1 skrev whit3rd:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less
advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only survives
because some people never got around to learning anything
better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY of a
language that matters; there weren't a lot of FORTRAN or APL or
ALGOL machines on the consumer market, but Commodore, Apple, TI
99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early 1980s) machines that,
out-of-the-box, could run BASIC. That was an improvement on the
CP/M machines offered in the seventies.


yeh, how many people got into a career of programming from their
first taste of programming basic on one of the 17 million C64s sold

I think it was probably 6502 CPU based kit of all brands that holds the
record for largest share of home computers and biggest hobby influence.

CPM and 8080/Z80 held sway in small businesses for a while but they were
priced well beyond what most hobbyists could afford. Early FORTRAN
compilers on such platforms were very strict language implementations
and "portable" code from mainframes wouldn't always compile without some
adjustment to remove the extensions unwittingly used by the author(s).

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 6:35:19 PM UTC+11, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in news:9bdd6032-3d58-4935-
9086-f003ac12c3db@googlegroups.com:

You have my deepest sympathy.

It was an improvement over 4X tape layouts.

The draftsmen that used it didn't like it much, and if you did something else for a couple of days there was apparently a tendency to forget what you had to do to get it to work. More recent layout programs are a lot more user-friendly.

> You should deserve sympathy for your psychopathy, but you do not.

Disagreeing with you isn't evidence of psychopathology, even if you want to think that it is. The problem is that you get stuff wrong from time to time, and don't like it when the errors get pointed out, which does happen to be a pathological reaction, or at least a lot less than constructive.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 6:26:41 PM UTC+11, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in news:9bdd6032-3d58-4935-
9086-f003ac12c3db@googlegroups.com:

You left out what it ran on. That is how one dates their "first
computer".

MS/DOS was the operating system, if I remember rightly.

I was referring the the processor that line had.

Not exactly explicitly. It seems to have been an 8086.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Martin Brown]

On 05/02/2020 07:39, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 5:50:25 PM UTC+11, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 10:06:08 PM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 2:00:08 PM UTC+11, whit3rd
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less
advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only
survives because some people never got around to learning
anything better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY
...Commodore, Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early
1980s) machines that, out-of-the-box, could run BASIC.

The machines don't run a particular programing language.

They do if it's in ROM.

The processor doesn't care if it reading data out of ROM or from some
other kind of memory. If the manufacturer went to the trouble of
building in a particular software on ROM, it's always there, but you
can pretty much always get what you want from some other source.

Self modifying code doesn't work well in ROM. And the TI9900 could be
particularly vexing if its program counter register ended up in ROM.

There were comparatively few early machines where you could swap the
soldered in ROMs or had spare sockets for additional ones. The BBC Micro
was one such and ISTR there were optional BCPL, Forth, Lisp, Logo &
Pascal ROMs available as well as drivers for FD/HD and IEEE.

Software available in those days was actually expensive stuff. Shareware
and FTP hadn't been invented. Most hobby stuff resided on cassette tape.

Oh, I made and used a few long T15 screwdrivers back in the day.
And volumes one through six of Inside Macintosh still sit on my
shelf.

So you chose to pay half as much again for your processing hardware
as you needed to. It keeps life simple, but it isn't an economical
approach.

In the early days of the Mac is was a commercial advantage bar none if
you had one. Laser printed professional looking DTP business proposals
stood out when everyone else's was on scraggy dot matrix printout.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 6:17:28 PM UTC+11, tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

On Tuesday, 4 February 2020 15:39:55 UTC, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:f64588f4-cc6c-4b12-9d88-a142dffaeb6e@googlegroups.com:

It's got no other obvious advantage as a teaching tool, and if it
persists in computer science classes, it is for the same reason
that elementary electronics classes still use the 741 and the 555
- nobody has bothered to rewrite the course notes around anything
better.

You are a true idiot.

pretty much, albeit not the classic kind of idiot. The huge narcissistic ego does him no favours.

NT is the kind of narcissist who thinks that anybody who doesn't take him seriously has some kind of mental defect. Since he presumably gets told that he's a narcissist at pretty regular intervals, it is the insult that comes to his mind most easily.

The correct way of dealing with him would be to ignore him but he posts such tempting fatuities that this can be difficult.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 7:40:44 PM UTC+11, Martin Brown wrote:

On 05/02/2020 07:39, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 5:50:25 PM UTC+11, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 10:06:08 PM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 2:00:08 PM UTC+11, whit3rd
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

<snip>

Oh, I made and used a few long T15 screwdrivers back in the day.
And volumes one through six of Inside Macintosh still sit on my
shelf.

So you chose to pay half as much again for your processing hardware
as you needed to. It keeps life simple, but it isn't an economical
approach.

In the early days of the Mac is was a commercial advantage bar none if
you had one. Laser printed professional looking DTP business proposals
stood out when everyone else's was on scraggy dot matrix printout.

That wasn't the only option. Byte published a long article on using an IBM golf-ball typewriter as a computer-controlled printer, and I think that there were other formed-character printers that did as well.

Cheap high resolution ink jet printers started showing up around 1990 for the consumer market.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote in
news:r1dv3m$1k9l$2@gioia.aioe.org:

On 05/02/2020 03:19, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:
onsdag den 5. februar 2020 kl. 04.00.08 UTC+1 skrev whit3rd:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less
advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only
survives because some people never got around to learning
anything better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY of
a language that matters; there weren't a lot of FORTRAN or APL
or ALGOL machines on the consumer market, but Commodore, Apple,
TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early 1980s) machines that,
out-of-the-box, could run BASIC. That was an improvement on the
CP/M machines offered in the seventies.


yeh, how many people got into a career of programming from their
first taste of programming basic on one of the 17 million C64s
sold

I think it was probably 6502 CPU based kit of all brands that
holds the record for largest share of home computers and biggest
hobby influence.

CPM and 8080/Z80 held sway in small businesses for a while but
they were priced well beyond what most hobbyists could afford.
Early FORTRAN compilers on such platforms were very strict
language implementations and "portable" code from mainframes
wouldn't always compile without some adjustment to remove the
extensions unwittingly used by the author(s).

Do not forget that the Z80 was also embraced by the arcade game
industry in pinballs and upright video games before they started
using just about all the others too. But a LOT of Z80
implementations.

Bally, Midway, Williams, Stern... Chicago Coin...

I think they are actually not as recognized as they should be for
their position in computing coding for control (pinball) and sound
(pinballs and games) and graphics (sprite based gaming) etc.

They even coded for the first 100% frame specific index encoded
optical disc based memory retrieval during live gameplay paradigms.

 

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:de8ea984-bae4-49db-896b-b9c0d95a4de1@googlegroups.com:

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 6:35:19 PM UTC+11,
DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:9bdd6032-3d58-4935- 9086-f003ac12c3db@googlegroups.com:

You have my deepest sympathy.

It was an improvement over 4X tape layouts.

The draftsmen that used it didn't like it much,

What the fuck are you mumbling about, boy?

There were hundreds of small businesses that could not afford UNIX
based CAD worksations that were the thing at the time. AutoCAD was
one of the first, and also one of the early regular CAD packages that
could be fashioned to do PCB layer layouts and artwork on large pen
plotters.

and if you did
something else for a couple of days

Still mumbling, I see.

there was apparently a
tendency to forget what you had to do to get it to work.

Still mumbling. Once the user interface was learned, it worked
quite well for our purposes and we had our own camera so could send
the PCB houses ready to go films and gerber files.

More
recent layout programs are a lot more user-friendly.

No shit. Here I was thinking that they stagnated like you did.

I have used many of the PCB layout packages over the years.

You should deserve sympathy for your psychopathy, but you do
not.

Disagreeing with you isn't evidence of psychopathology,

Except it isn't just me. And yes, your behavior in this group does
have indicators of such a determination.

even if
you want to think that it is. The problem is that you get stuff
wrong from time to time,

You have a serious problem. You make presumptions, and when you
get called on it, you fail to admit that you made yet another
retarded presumption.

and don't like it when the errors get
pointed out,

You'll need to actually point one out before I'll have no problem
admiting it. Your problem is that you make stupid presumptions about
people and you are too stupid yourself to even see your glaringly
blatant flaw. This thread is a perfect example.

which does happen to be a pathological reaction, or
at least a lot less than constructive.

 

DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote in news:r1e987$14c8$1
@gioia.aioe.org:

Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote in
news:r1dv3m$1k9l$2@gioia.aioe.org:

On 05/02/2020 03:19, Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote:
onsdag den 5. februar 2020 kl. 04.00.08 UTC+1 skrev whit3rd:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less
advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only
survives because some people never got around to learning
anything better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY of
a language that matters; there weren't a lot of FORTRAN or APL
or ALGOL machines on the consumer market, but Commodore, Apple,
TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early 1980s) machines that,
out-of-the-box, could run BASIC. That was an improvement on the
CP/M machines offered in the seventies.


yeh, how many people got into a career of programming from their
first taste of programming basic on one of the 17 million C64s
sold

I think it was probably 6502 CPU based kit of all brands that
holds the record for largest share of home computers and biggest
hobby influence.

CPM and 8080/Z80 held sway in small businesses for a while but
they were priced well beyond what most hobbyists could afford.
Early FORTRAN compilers on such platforms were very strict
language implementations and "portable" code from mainframes
wouldn't always compile without some adjustment to remove the
extensions unwittingly used by the author(s).


Do not forget that the Z80 was also embraced by the arcade game
industry in pinballs and upright video games before they started
using just about all the others too. But a LOT of Z80
implementations.

Bally, Midway, Williams, Stern... Chicago Coin...

I think they are actually not as recognized as they should be for
their position in computing coding for control (pinball) and sound
(pinballs and games) and graphics (sprite based gaming) etc.

They even coded for the first 100% frame specific index encoded
optical disc based memory retrieval during live gameplay paradigms.

Actually should mention also that large piano companies, such as
Baldwin used them in their earliest electronic pianos, organs and
kayboard equiped synth offerings.

Then of course there was MOOG, but I am not sure if his stuff had
any processing in it. It was pure anaolg manipulation, no?

 

DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote in news:r1e8nh$11mq$1
@gioia.aioe.org:

Still mumbling. Once the user interface was learned, it worked
quite well for our purposes and we had our own camera so could send
the PCB houses ready to go films and gerber files.

IOW, early AutoCAD was easy, punk.

 

[Bill Sloman]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 10:36:08 PM UTC+11, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote in news:r1e8nh$11mq$1
@gioia.aioe.org:

Still mumbling. Once the user interface was learned, it worked
quite well for our purposes and we had our own camera so could send
the PCB houses ready to go films and gerber files.

IOW, early AutoCAD was easy, punk.

It might have been after you'd be trained up on it, but our draftsmen did complain that it was easy to forget the training.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 10:00:08 PM UTC-5, whit3rd wrote:

On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11, tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only survives because some people never got around to learning anything better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY of a language that matters;
there weren't a lot of FORTRAN or APL or ALGOL machines on the consumer market, but Commodore,
Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early 1980s) machines that, out-of-the-box, could run BASIC.
That was an improvement on the CP/M machines offered in the seventies.

The Macintosh broke that mold (you could get BASIC, but that wasn't standard equipment).
The GUI options favored more modern environments (like, Excel - which was Macintosh-only
at introduction).

For my Mac, there was a BASIC but also FORTRAN and APL. And did array-processor things
for work, using the graphic-terminal capability of the good old toaster.

The Commodore 128 could run CPM, along with C64 mode.

 

[whit3rd]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 3:42:53 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman wrote:

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 10:36:08 PM UTC+11, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:

IOW, early AutoCAD was easy ...

It might have been after you'd be trained up on it, but our draftsmen did complain that it was easy to forget the training.

The MacPaint application, on the other hand, was easy to use, intuitive, and could get an image
pixel-level edited. I was making printed circuit boards with it, when the PostScript laser
printers first came available; the combination of printer-directed magnification adjustment
and easy image composition made a usable ink-on-paper negative that could be transferred
to Kodalith and you're ready to burn boards.

There's still a box of Bishop Graphics tapes and stickers in the closet, which is also
intuitive enough for naiive use... as long as it's not a big project, 'cuz it's not clear how a
modern printed circuit shop would be able to produce from that.

 

[Clifford Heath]

On 5/2/20 4:41 pm, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:

Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:cf28cebc-9f11-4392-8ba6-6d041110e74a@googlegroups.com:

My first home computer was one of Alan Sugar's Amstrad versions of
the IBM PC (which I picked up second hand). My wife got hers some
months earlier.

You left out what it ran on. That is how one dates their "first
computer".

I used actual IBM XTs at my workplace in 1986 to make 4X PCB
layouts with AutoCAD 2.

I used an original IBM PC in 1983 to write my first commercial
shrink-wrapped software product (a personal filing system called Wot),
using a C compiler that required swapping the floppy discs several times
per source file. I still have the source code of that product.

During that year we got the first copy of MS/DOS 2 into Australia
(couriered by DHL overnight from the launch event in Seattle) - and now
could put files into sub-directories instead of all files in the root
dir. Combined with a 5MB hard drive it became a properly workable machine!

Clifford Heath.

 

[Jasen Betts]

On 2020-02-05, Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

On 05/02/2020 07:39, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 5:50:25 PM UTC+11, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 10:06:08 PM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 2:00:08 PM UTC+11, whit3rd
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less
advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only
survives because some people never got around to learning
anything better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY
...Commodore, Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early
1980s) machines that, out-of-the-box, could run BASIC.

The machines don't run a particular programing language.

They do if it's in ROM.

The processor doesn't care if it reading data out of ROM or from some
other kind of memory. If the manufacturer went to the trouble of
building in a particular software on ROM, it's always there, but you
can pretty much always get what you want from some other source.

Self modifying code doesn't work well in ROM. And the TI9900 could be
particularly vexing if its program counter register ended up in ROM.

There were comparatively few early machines where you could swap the
soldered in ROMs or had spare sockets for additional ones. The BBC Micro
was one such and ISTR there were optional BCPL, Forth, Lisp, Logo &
Pascal ROMs available as well as drivers for FD/HD and IEEE.

No, the capability was very common, eg: Commodore 64 could do it via
an external connector.

Software available in those days was actually expensive stuff.

Shareware and FTP hadn't been invented. Most hobby stuff resided on cassette tape.

Simtel started in 1979, and later grew to include PC software. The
hard bit was getting acess to the internet.

In the early days of the Mac is was a commercial advantage bar none if
you had one. Laser printed professional looking DTP business proposals
stood out when everyone else's was on scraggy dot matrix printout.

It's not like Apple invented the desktop laser printer.

--
Jasen.

 

[whit3rd]

On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 8:02:37 PM UTC-8, Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2020-02-05, Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:

In the early days of the Mac is was a commercial advantage bar none if
you had one. Laser printed professional looking DTP business proposals
stood out when everyone else's was on scraggy dot matrix printout.

It's not like Apple invented the desktop laser printer.

No, but because all Macintosh computers had serial ports that could
join a multidrop twisted pair network (AppleTalk/LocalTalk), their desktop
printers were inexpensive to network. The LaserWriter II was a more
intelligent item than most PCs, and it was very popular. HP copied the
network hardware for their laser printers, and optioned the PostScript to be competitive.

The 'desktop' feature wasn't what sold 'em; it was the office cluster of high-res printers.

 

Clifford Heath <no.spam@please.net> wrote in
news:VLH_F.77279$8Y7.59798@fx05.iad:

On 5/2/20 4:41 pm, DecadentLinuxUserNumeroUno@decadence.org wrote:
Bill Sloman <bill.sloman@ieee.org> wrote in
news:cf28cebc-9f11-4392-8ba6-6d041110e74a@googlegroups.com:

My first home computer was one of Alan Sugar's Amstrad versions
of the IBM PC (which I picked up second hand). My wife got hers
some months earlier.

You left out what it ran on. That is how one dates their
"first
computer".

I used actual IBM XTs at my workplace in 1986 to make 4X PCB
layouts with AutoCAD 2.

I used an original IBM PC in 1983 to write my first commercial
shrink-wrapped software product (a personal filing system called
Wot), using a C compiler that required swapping the floppy discs
several times per source file. I still have the source code of
that product.

During that year we got the first copy of MS/DOS 2 into Australia
(couriered by DHL overnight from the launch event in Seattle) -
and now could put files into sub-directories instead of all files
in the root dir. Combined with a 5MB hard drive it became a
properly workable machine!

Clifford Heath.

Just don't try out the OS by typing in format C:

There was a root file/directory count limit and a per directory
limit too IIRC.

 

[Martin Brown]

On 06/02/2020 03:55, Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2020-02-05, Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 05/02/2020 07:39, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 5:50:25 PM UTC+11, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 10:06:08 PM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 2:00:08 PM UTC+11, whit3rd
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less
advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only
survives because some people never got around to learning
anything better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY
...Commodore, Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early
1980s) machines that, out-of-the-box, could run BASIC.

The machines don't run a particular programing language.

They do if it's in ROM.

The processor doesn't care if it reading data out of ROM or from some
other kind of memory. If the manufacturer went to the trouble of
building in a particular software on ROM, it's always there, but you
can pretty much always get what you want from some other source.

Self modifying code doesn't work well in ROM. And the TI9900 could be
particularly vexing if its program counter register ended up in ROM.

There were comparatively few early machines where you could swap the
soldered in ROMs or had spare sockets for additional ones. The BBC Micro
was one such and ISTR there were optional BCPL, Forth, Lisp, Logo &
Pascal ROMs available as well as drivers for FD/HD and IEEE.

No, the capability was very common, eg: Commodore 64 could do it via
an external connector.

I don't think it was all that common. I never did anything with a C64.
The only Commodore I ran into was the PET and only then to acquire its
external hard disk drive control protocol for our IEEE interface.

ISTR the TI99/4 had cartridge slots too. But they were the exception
rather then the rule. ZX80, Spectrum, QL and various knock offs were all
hardwired BASIC ROM interpreters. Jupiter ACE was a notable exception to
the rule being a Forth based unit (not a great commercial success). It
had better performance and a B&W display but was predictably hell to
program. About 10x faster than a typical basic interpretter of the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_Ace

Good for realtime work but Forth is very much a write only language.

Software available in those days was actually expensive stuff.

Shareware and FTP hadn't been invented. Most hobby stuff resided on cassette tape.

Simtel started in 1979, and later grew to include PC software. The
hard bit was getting acess to the internet.

ISTR it was still called EPSS back then. A few people had accounts on it
but you couldn't really do much apart from log on to very remote sites.

In the early days of the Mac is was a commercial advantage bar none if
you had one. Laser printed professional looking DTP business proposals
stood out when everyone else's was on scraggy dot matrix printout.

It's not like Apple invented the desktop laser printer.

The point was that their DTP environment was precise WYSIWYG something
which Microsoft have yet to master. Mickeysoft Word documents almost
never look the same on screen as they do when when printed out on
different physical devices. It is pretty much pot luck even today.

--
Regards,
Martin Brown

 

[Michael Terrell]

On Thursday, February 6, 2020 at 6:00:28 AM UTC-5, Martin Brown wrote:

On 06/02/2020 03:55, Jasen Betts wrote:
On 2020-02-05, Martin Brown <'''newspam'''@nezumi.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 05/02/2020 07:39, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 5:50:25 PM UTC+11, whit3rd wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 10:06:08 PM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Wednesday, February 5, 2020 at 2:00:08 PM UTC+11, whit3rd
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 4:51:35 AM UTC-8, Bill Sloman
wrote:
On Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 9:33:20 PM UTC+11,
tabb...@gmail.com wrote:

Computing today without Basic would be significantly less
advanced.

Really? BASIC was a very primitive language, and it only
survives because some people never got around to learning
anything better.

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY
...Commodore, Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early
1980s) machines that, out-of-the-box, could run BASIC.

The machines don't run a particular programing language.

They do if it's in ROM.

The processor doesn't care if it reading data out of ROM or from some
other kind of memory. If the manufacturer went to the trouble of
building in a particular software on ROM, it's always there, but you
can pretty much always get what you want from some other source.

Self modifying code doesn't work well in ROM. And the TI9900 could be
particularly vexing if its program counter register ended up in ROM.

There were comparatively few early machines where you could swap the
soldered in ROMs or had spare sockets for additional ones. The BBC Micro
was one such and ISTR there were optional BCPL, Forth, Lisp, Logo &
Pascal ROMs available as well as drivers for FD/HD and IEEE.

No, the capability was very common, eg: Commodore 64 could do it via
an external connector.

I don't think it was all that common. I never did anything with a C64.
The only Commodore I ran into was the PET and only then to acquire its
external hard disk drive control protocol for our IEEE interface.

ISTR the TI99/4 had cartridge slots too. But they were the exception
rather then the rule. ZX80, Spectrum, QL and various knock offs were all
hardwired BASIC ROM interpreters. Jupiter ACE was a notable exception to
the rule being a Forth based unit (not a great commercial success). It
had better performance and a B&W display but was predictably hell to
program. About 10x faster than a typical basic interpretter of the day.

All the 8 bit Commodore 6502 family based computers after the PET had cartridge slots:
Vic 20
C64
SX64
B128
C128
C16

and another one or two sold before the went to the Amiga an IBM clone markets

 

[Rick C]

On Sunday, February 2, 2020 at 1:59:32 PM UTC-5, dca...@krl.org wrote:

On Sunday, February 2, 2020 at 8:39:36 AM UTC-5, DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:


On Sunday, February 2, 2020 at 10:38:19 PM UTC+11,
DecadentLinux...@decadence.org wrote:



You are truly an idiot and obviously did NOT watch the video.

Thanks for posting that link. It refreshed my memory of the development of operating systems.

Do not pay any attension to Bill. He has a condition similar to turrets syndrome. He has to post something negative about nearly all posts.

He is missing the big picture with BASIC for sure. BASIC isn't about him. It is about allowing computer programming to be taught to students rapidly and exposing many, many people to a programming language they would otherwise have never seen. While BASIC isn't required for doing anything, it allows many to do something they would have otherwise not had the time to learn. The video talks about that and anyone who grew up in the 70s or 80s would know early home computers were all about BASIC leading many to enter the computing field who otherwise would not have.

--

Rick C.

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