15 Oct
2012
15 Oct
'12
10:23 a.m.
On 15 October 2012 17:26, David Riley <fraveydank at gmail.com> wrote:
On Oct 15, 2012, at 11:59 AM, Ethan Dicks wrote:
Multitasking: CamelForth for the ZX Spectrum (& other low-end Z80
machines) could do this in the very early 1980s - indeed it was one of
its selling points. I think it also had a very primitive
implementation of text-based windows on screen. As with the other
8-bit Forths I heard of - and Chuck Moore's ColorForth to this day -
it was/is *both* a programming language *and* an OS.
Network interfaces: Econet for the BBC Mico? Localtalk on the original
Apple Macintosh?
Or even the once-famed "$25 Network" for the PC, which like several
other early peer-to-peer LANs in the mid-1980s significantly predated
Ethernet's availability as an affordable system. Also see: SAGE
MainLAN, whose developer I met at a birthday party earlier this year.
--
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My recollection is that there was a perceptual
divide between "serious
machines for serious business" and "toy machines for playing around
with at home". The following technologies existed abundantly outside
of the IBM-compatible PC realm before being adopted one-by-one
with the claim (suddenly) that these were "must have" technologies.
o Color
o Sound
o Network Interface
o Graphics co-processors
o Multitasking OS
o Input devices other than traditional 'keyboard'
Not disputing anything, but I'm curious about early examples of
network interfaces and multitasking OSes for machines which were
typically designated as "toys".