Microsoft open sources GWBASIC

On Tue, 26 May 2020 at 21:52, Jim Brain via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: *Nod* Shame but it's fair enough. I think there is at the least an article (and possibly an entire university course module) comparing European and United States hardware and software design schools in the early, pre-standardisation days before the general-purpose computing market collapsed down to, essentially, x86 versus ARM and Windows NT versus *nix, which is where we are today. One could usefully compare this to the Japanese market, for a long time _entirely_ separate and almost unknown anywhere else... and the relatively tiny but important and totally different Japanese _export_ market. In extremely broad, hand-wavey strokes: In the early *microcomputer* days (1970s and early 1980s) US: CP/M in business, meaning Z80. Home computers mainly 6502. Converged by putting Z80s into 6502 machines, eventually built-in. EU: lots of totally dissimilar, incompatible makes and models, with Z80 having a slight edge. No real convergence, CP/M much rarer due to cost, and only ever becomes noticeably significant due to the Amstrad PCW range from 1985-1990, by which point it was dead in its home market. After the IBM PC became dominant: US focusses on increasingly large/complex OSes to run on x86, and to a lesser extent, 680x0 and later RISC. Windows 3 finally brings grown-up font handling in the 1990s, allowing vanilla PCs to finally conquer the Japanese domestic market. EU: custom hardware continues, running custom OSes. Psion does EPOC for its tiny power-efficient PDAs, then rewrites it totally in C++ for ARM, creating EPOC32. EPOC32 becomes Symbian and makes smartphones quite mainstream, aided by a unified world cellphone market for GSM devices. US/Canada: no GSM, so no unified cellphone market, so pagers continue, leading to increasingly elaborate devices with QWERTY keyboards, fostering the development of multiple proprietary devices: RIM Blackberry, Danger Hiptop, PalmPilot/Handspring. MS WinCE makes some headway with very complex, fiddly little pocket computers with poor performance and disastrous battery life, which also sell well in gadget-obsessed Japan. Finally in 2007 Apple sweeps all this away with the iPhone: very complex desktop-derived software requiring an extremely powerful device, but giving a very simple user interface. Google hastily pivots its Android aquisition from being a Blackberry-killer to being an iPhone-ripoff. This finally makes US smartphones competive in the European/Japanese markets, previously dominated by Symbian on Nokia, Sony/Ericsson and other hardware with one tenth or less of the resources of the iPhone. Moore's law makes these affordable, bringing tech originating in the PC/Mac desktop market -- iOS, derived from Mac OS X, derived from NeXTstep, originating from the Apple cofounder -- into the pocket computer market and eliminating all other players. Rare exceptions, such as Apple and Be, who did European-style designs (relatively small/simple proprietary OSs and apps on proprietary machines with non-industry-standard CPUs) surrender and die or join the mainstream, first by moving to an xNix base, then to x86. True, but I mean, I'm heading for my mid-50s and all that was before my time. True. :-( :-( :-) No no. It wasn't that. It was _money_. On average, talking about food and clothing and vehicles and fuel and the general cost of goods, everything is cheaper in the US than in the rest of the developed world. USAnians do not generally realise this. US gasoline: just under $2/gallon, right? Google says $1.96. Call it $2. UK petrol (same stuff): ?1.06/litre. ?4 per US gallon. That's $5. I live in the Czech Republic, a much cheaper country than anywhere English-speaking, but fuel costs the same as in the rest of the EU. Fuel is 2.5 times more expensive for Brits than Americans. That's why our cars and motorbikes have smaller engines. It's partly why every other developed nation has more public transport: because for us, it's competitive, whereas for you, it's not -- your fuel is subsidised to the tune of being about a third of what it should cost on the open market. That's both why and because the US military/industrial machine is so strong. I have never owned an automobile in my adult life. I got a drivers' licence when I was 36. But if I left my home _now_ I could be at my old place, in Brno, in 3h 30min and it would cost me $12. Tram from here to Prague main station: $1. Ticket to Brno on the 9PM train (2h20min, 120 mileS): $10. Tram from the main station in Brno to my old place: $1. I'd be there before midnight. That's _why_ I have never owned a car. I don't need one. I have never needed one. If I do, I rent one. I have done this twice in my life so far. When US computers came to Europe, they were about 2?-3? more expensive than local ones, AND vendors converted the pricing by removing the $ and replacing it with ? (or the equivalent in any of the dozen local currencies in continental Europe.) In the 1980s that effectively inflated prices by about another 2? to 3?. So the ground-breaking first cheap US home computer was the Apple II, which cost US$1,298 at launch (equivalent to $5,476 in 2019 says Wikipedia). That was the price of a car here. So instead, a few years later, we got the Sinclair ZX80, which was ?99.95 (?432; $576 at 2020 prices) It's not that we tolerate lower specifications. It's not that we have a lower barrier of entry. It's not that we tolerated poorer computers. It's that we couldn't _afford_ US computers. A cheap US home computer, such as you would give to a child as a toy, cost as much as an automobile. A fancy professional computer, such as an adult could use for their work, cost as much as a house or an apartment. And that was the case until Amstrad disrupted the market with the ground-breaking PC1512 in 1986. A PC clone for ?499. Before that, a _nice_ PC from Compaq could cost ?5000. (OK, a cheap clone would be only ?1500 or so.) We had simple cheap low-spec computers because American high-end computers were impossibly expensive. In my first job in 1988, we did sell Compaq and IBM PCs, but I worked for a fancy high-end value-added reseller. The first ISA-bus 386 I ever saw was a Compaq Deskpro 386 and it was destined to become a Netware fileserver, attached to cheaper clone PCs. But the next dealership I worked for sold Amstrads. You know that MSX was an American design, right? It just happened that it only succeeded in Japan. It was broadly a Spectravideo-based design with a Microsoft ROM. Yes, some design input from ANSI Corp of Japan, but basically an American thing. I guess I had not realised until this thread how relatively uniform the US computer scene was... True. Interesting. Fred has one counter-example. Just the one. Very interesting. I guess I am realising that CP/M was a much bigger deal there than here. Amstrad's 8-bitters, the CPC series, had a DOS that was CP/M derived and they could optionally run CP/M, but no home user here cared. It was only the Amstrad PCW that changed that. The PCW was a proprietary word-processor, which booted its proprietary WP app directly off floppy -- no OS, no ROM chip. But luckily, someone on the design team extended the design slightly and made it able to run CP/M and it came with a CP/M disk in the box, meaning Amstrad could advertise and promote it as a computer. (Bear in mind this was before Amstrad made PC clones, and this "business computer" was about quarter of the price of a very cheap clone PC.) Amstrad didn't learn from this -- after 3 million-selling PCW models, the 2 successor models couldn't run CP/M and both flopped. -- Liam Proven ? Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? gMail/gTalk/gHangouts: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/LinkedIn/Flickr: lproven ? Skype: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 ? ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053