[cctalk] Re: BASIC

I was thinking the other day, that I wish the startup BIOS of modern systems had BASIC - such as in a modern i7 based laptop. At the very least, with all the trig functions, it's as useful as any graphing calculator, or time features make it useful as a clock or stopwatch. In the variants that had PEEK/POKE, then BASIC essentially becomes as useful as an assembler (since you can place the opcodes into DATA statements and POKE and SYS them anywhere into memory). It took me awhile to realize why original variants of BASIC didn't have PEEK/POKE: they were probably timeshare systems, and so arbitrary access to write to system memory would be taboo in those environments. But in a single-user micros, that address space is all yours. Even if your main storage components are kaput, boot up BASIC still allows the system to be useful. Most variants will have keywords or features to make use of serial IO, so you could pipe in a larger program through that (or do a simple terminal program). For sure BASIC has its limitations, but I appreciate how it can function with extremely limited resources (and as a somewhat intuitive interface to programmatically access other system calls). -Steve On Fri, May 3, 2024 at 8:59 AM Sellam Abraham via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: