24 May
2006
24 May
'06
3:49 a.m.
At 05:26 PM 5/22/06 -0700, you wrote:
--- Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
I wasn't suggesting it didn't have any uses. I for
one always looked fondly upon rom based languages. I
was just curious if, besides an example like you
cited, was anything substantive ever done with them.
The Vesta OEM-188 board, aka the Radio Electronics RE
Robot brain/board thing, has not only BASIC, but FORTH
built in. My Canon Cat also has a FORTH interpreter.
Who used them? And for what?
Just FWIW the IBM APL used the builtin ROM BASIC and it wouldn't run on
a machine without it. AFIK none of the other IBM PC programming langauses
used it
Joe
The BASICs were built
period).
But who the heck made any serious use of
ROM
based BASIC in the *pseudo* 16 bit era and
beyond?
Depends on what you mean by 'serious use', but I was
certainly glad of
ROM basic when my 5160 XT wouldn't boot. I used it
to write values to
output ports on the disk controller card while
probing signals with a
logic probe. Found a defective inverter chip very
quickly. into IBM pc's until possibly 1990 or so. One might
get
the impression that they were there for a reason.
Years ago, while they still had a production facility
on Long Island, I had heard that Symbol made use of
QBasic (probably because they were thrifty). No, no
longer a rom based implementation, but came with it
for nothing.
Sure a machine code monitor would have been even
nicer, but...
Agreed. One of the dandiest features of puters like
the C64. But come to think of it maybe that was on a
separate cartridge. It's been a while...
-tony
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