5 Jan
2012
5 Jan
'12
10:29 a.m.
On Thu, Jan 5, 2012 at 12:55 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:
On 01/05/2012 12:20 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
?[raises hand]
?Oooh! ?I know this one! ?Because it was hands-down THE most popular,
widely-deployed one from the 1980s, at least in the US.
I can get behind that.
For those that might want to dabble lightly with 1980s Commodore BASIC
on a modern machine, let me shamelessly plug
http://sourceforge.net/projects/cbmbasic/
Wow. You chose to reimplement the poorest-quality BASIC I ever met,
back in the day! Er - why? (or maybe because he wanted to!)
That never hurts.
?Of course a statement like that is sure to draw
people out of the woodwork
screaming "NO! <xyz> was the most popular!"
Bring it. ;-)
?No, I was never a "commie" by any stretch...
I was, from day one. I _used_ other machines, and I did admire
certain features of other machines (like the Hi-res graphics of the
Apple II when all I had was a character-graphic PET), but really
enjoyed getting to know Commodore products at the ROM-code and
register level (something I never enjoyed on the Apple II, even when I
was being paid to to program it - I appreciate and admire Woz's
hardware from a technician's standpoint, but I can't stand the
consequences of his achievements from a programming standpoint).
but of all the people I knew who had computers at home
in the
1980s when I was in high school, the breakdown went something like this:
?90%: Commodore 64 or VIC-20
?5%: Atari 400 or 800
?1%: Apple (rich kids)
?1%: COCO
?1%: Non-COCO TRS-80 (kids with parents who ran their own businesses)
?1%: CP/M
?1%: RSTS/E =) ?(only 1...betcha can't guess who that was!)
I'd say that was about right, though for the crowd I knew, I'd flip
Atari and Apple, largely because we had a lot of Apples in local
schools and a lot of parents just went with the expensive but easy
option when buying a machine. I did know a couple of Ohio Scientific
owners, but that's probably because the company was a couple of hours
from where I grew up, and one DEC Rainbow owner (Dad
was a lawyer for
whom cost was not a deciding factor).
Later, of course, the whole mess shifted to PC, Amiga, and Mac, with
some 68K Atari owners hanging off the fringes, but the days of BASIC
were over - even if someone happened to own a PC with BASIC in ROM, I
never saw that it in use past about 1984.
-ethan