teaching programming to kids - Re: Looking for 8080/Z80 BASIC

On Tue, Jan 10, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote: . . . Yes. Yes. In the very early 1980s, the cheapest, nastiest, crappiest common computer I encountered in the States was the Sinclair ZX80 (and even then, I think I knew 3-4 owners - fewer than Apples). Worst keyboard ever, video that interrupted to process keystrokes, "one-touch" keyword input for BASIC, a RAM expander that flaked out when you pressed the keyboard hard enough to register keystrokes, and so on. It had one (and to me, only one) market advantage: it was under $100. After the VIC-20 dropped below $100 (from its initial price of $299) and took over the bottom of the home computer market, I don't think I ever saw another ZX80 powered up again. I knew one Sinclair QL (68008-based) owner in the States. He was a total fanatic about it, and it was the least expensive way to play with one of the coolest architectures of the day, but he was alone in his mania - even he didn't know any other local owners in a city of a million people. I never saw an Oric, a Dragon, or an Acorn here. I might have seen an Amstrad or two by the late 1980s. Commodore continued to advertise the "learning" aspects of the C-64, but I doubt many were sold because of that. It hit the US market at $599, dropped to, IIRC, $299 after a couple of years, and by the late 1980s, was selling at toy stores for $99. They sold millions of them for $99. Jack Tramiel's business goals were as plainly stated as can be - when faced with the "imminent invasion" of MSX (which never gained any traction in the States, but I think I saw a couple in shop windows when I lived in the UK for the summer of 1985) he famously declared "we will become the Japanese" and priced the C-64 so low, nobody could touch the combination of memory, sound, and graphics for the price. As part of that, since Commodore had purchased a license for Microsoft BASIC at very favorable terms to Commodore (I don't remember the deepest details off the top of my head, but the effect was a lifetime license for BASIC2 for little or no cost), updating the BASIC would have added, in effect, a Microsoft tax on every Commodore computer sold. To Tramiel especially, this would have been a serious disincentive to update BASIC. When the C-64 was selling for $99, it was profitable. IIRC, the cost to Commodore per unit was around $16-$18. Adding even a $10-per-unit license fee would have been a significant hit to profitability. Upgrading BASIC wouldn't really add enough new customers to pay for itself. They sold a lot of game cartridges for the VIC-20, and a lot of RAM expanders. The real problem with the VIC-20 was the chunky 22x23 screen. If you didn't have a lot of money, it was barely tolerable (i.e. better than no computer, and better than some because it had color in a day when that was not a universal feature). If you had money, you put the VIC-20 in the closet and bought a C-64. And there's part of the problem - pricing in the UK. The C-64 came out thirty years ago into a US market where IBM was rapidly displacing other machines in the office, but at $2K-$5K, was not making inroads into the home (yet) where the Apple II was the king of the hill. Expensive ($1200-$2000 was ordinary, depending on mono vs color monitor and 1 vs 2 disk drives), but highly desired and sought after. At $599 for the computer itself and another $499-599 for the external diskette drive, lots of people opted for the $99 tape drive. Even for those that splurged and bought CPU+disk, that was the same cost as a low-end Apple II (mono monitor, 16K, 1 disk, 1-bit sound...) Prices came down very quickly on the C-64 and very slowly on the Apple II, cementing the trend. People still desired the Apple II, but more _bought_ the C-64. Having spent 4 months of 1985 living and going to school in Europe (mostly Greece and the UK), I can say that the economics of home computers was entirely different on each side of the pond. You had models that were virtually unknown in the States and through import duties and VAT and the like, favorably priced against hideously expensive US imports. US prices fell so fast in the 1980s that Japanese and European models never could gain a foothold. The drop was rapid enough to kill off many of the once major players in the States (further accelerated by frequent clearance sales), so it was not without its "cost" even here. In this environment, we never saw the joke here. We just saw cheap computers. They all came with BASIC, they all had some good features and some bad, and people picked favorites for rational and irrational reasons. As part of the Commodore tribe, we looked down on the cost of the Apple II at the same time we looked up to its graphics and the expectation that it would have at least one floppy drive. We looked down on the crappy keyboard of the Atari 400 and clunky BASIC, and slightly up at the Antic graphics. We all looked down at the ZX80. And on and on. The other tribes rearranged their likes/dislikes and crowed about different features, but it was essentially the same tune. I don't remember a single person ever saying they were avoiding the C-64 specifically because they didn't thought its implementation of BASIC was inadequate. Buyers used entirely different priorization criteria. That's a lot of vitrol that I think is quite misplaced. Earlier in this thread, I listed a number of BASICs that I have personal experience with that I found far, far less pleasant to deal with than Microsoft BASIC2 on Commodore hardware. To recap and summarize, any BASIC that had significant array limitations (elements 255 or less, single dimensional, etc), had limited string handling (length, etc), had variable name limitations (one letter, or a VTOC "variable table"), lacked a screen editor, lacked disk/tape/screen I/O handling ("OPEN n/PRINT #n/CLOSE n" in CBM BASIC), lacked boolean operators, lacked substring processing, or lacked direct I/O port manipulation (via PEEK/POKE or some IN/OUT statements)... and there were *lots* of machines that had one or more of those deficiencies... *those* are the worst examples, shameful embarassments, stunted, crippled, etc. I'm not saying we never wished for BASIC statements to simplify sound and graphics manipulation - we did. Some of us bought or wrote BASIC extensions (I did it with "SYS X, n, n, n" and "USR()" mechanisms, as Cameron Kaiser was describing). Others just worked with BASIC as shipped and wrote (and shared through user groups and magazine articles) pretty cool programs for the C-64. Yet others decided to toss BASIC to the curb and wring every drop out of the hardware through assembly, but that's beyond the scope of this discussion. -ethan