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

On 5 January 2012 17:55, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote: Must be an American thing. It changed year-on-year and my memories are not that chronologically detailed, but here, from 1982 or so, it was something like: Sinclair, Oric, Commodore, Dragon, Acorn, and later Amstrad. Outliers - no significant numbers, probably in your 1% bracket - were weird stuff like Memotech, Camputers Lynx, Jupiter Ace, Video Genie, Atari, Mattel Aquarius, Sord M5, TI 99/4a, Newbrain, Apple. But in the main group, it was Sinclair at first, then later, as prices fell & people realised it was really all about games & almost nobody programmed the things, the superior hardware of the Commodore 64 trounced everything else. Later, Amstrad won out, because it had better hardware: bundled monitor and tape drive or a good fast disk drive, with lots of storage - DS/DD - although a weird 3" size. And the thing is, all of those had at least rudimentary BASICs with graphics and sound commands. And the Beeb with its proper procedural, structured BASIC. Except Commodore, which was just as sh*t on the C64 as it was on the VIC20, which was just as sh*t as it was on the Commodore PET. Now on the PET, it wasn't a problem. It didn't /have/ graphics or sound. But on the VIC20 it was an embarrassment, but then, with 5K of RAM or something, there wasn't /room/ to write anything much in BASIC. But on the C64, it was just a sick twisted evil joke to play on buyers of a ?300-?400 computer with market-leading graphics, best-of-breed sound, a decent keyboard and lots of RAM. It was like selling someone a full-priced 4X4 off road vehicle and putting Medi?val solid wooden carriage wheels on it. It was utterly crippled by its pathetic, 5-years-out-of-date language taken directly from a machine some 3 hardware generations earlier, outclassed by /every other product on the market/ in its segment. Which is why I am genuinely amazed to discover that someone's reimplemented it today! I am stunned. It is, for my money, THE single worst example of its type, the horrendous shameful guilty embarrassment of its generation, the twisted crippled mutant that people didn't talk about and kept locked in the attic. The deformed puppy that should have been stillborn. And anyway, Dave, if your justification is that it was the clear market leader, then by that argument, we should all be using x86 PCs - as they are 95% or more of the general-purpose computer market and have been for 20 years now - and on them we should be running MS Windows, because that's the utterly dominant market leading OS. And you wouldn't like that, would you? -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884