Why every 80s home computer used BASIC. - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 06:47:38 pm
content: Why every 80s home computer used BASIC.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:01:58 pm
content: QuoteThe jupiter ace didnt

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:19:57 pm
content: As someone from the era, I didn't find the vid useful or having depth.How are we teaching youths programming today? Why has Microsoft killed it off?I literally cry over the Arduino crowd getting destroyed learning embedded programming with a terrible language known as C. It could not be harder to learn and off-putting. We have the extra MCU horsepower nowadays to support interpreters.BASIC has run time error messages, essential for noobs starting out.I think the BASIC language has a place and use that got ruined by academics in computing science condemning it, from the goto statement to spaghetti code etc. and the language was not respected and is still frowned upon.

author: IanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:21:09 pm
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 22, 2025, 06:47:38 pmQuote from: themadhippy on April 22, 2025, 07:01:58 pmI wondered if someone would pop up and make that comment. One of them indeed used Forth.

author: IanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:23:59 pm
content: Quote from: floobydust on April 22, 2025, 07:19:57 pmNo modern programming environment is as accessible as a BASIC interpreter. It's really not clear why it's not used anymore to introduce people to programming.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:30:07 pm
content: In the 1970s, I analyzed most of my thesis data using a compiled Basic (from DEC) and some mainframe Fortran.Meanwhile, my wife took an entry-level programming course (for non-technical students) where the professor used System360 Assembler.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:35:50 pm
content: Still true today...

author: tooki
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:37:19 pm
content: Quote from: floobydust on April 22, 2025, 07:19:57 pmSure it could, it could be assembly language! :p

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 07:46:17 pm
content: Quote from: floobydust on April 22, 2025, 07:19:57 pmI would have loved to have access to C during the PC revolution, but the first programming language I learned was 8080 machine code, not assembly, but literal machine code.There were alternatives to BASIC like COMAL, FORTH, and LOGO. Of these I think FORTH would have been the best alternative and a great improvement over BASIC.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:09:10 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 22, 2025, 07:46:17 pmSame, on an Altair. We had to hand assemble it, then enter the hex codes in a dumb terminal. Then we learned BASIC on that same system. I doubt we stole ours from Bill. lol.Later we had some classes where they taught FORTRAN. I took PASCAL. Beyond that we used the 8085 lunch boxes for several labs where it was back to hand coding on paper and entering HEX codes.As painful as that was, the teacher for my digital classes wanted everything done with NAND gates. 7400 was it. I have to chuckle when a few of the locals get on their soap boxes about breadboards. Some of those stupid circuits we had to construct and get working would take three or more of those white boards, packed with 7400s. LOL.. RIP my old teachers.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:13:52 pm
content: A bit more history on BASIC.http://altairbasic.org/other%20versions/ian.htm

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:18:31 pm
content: Quote from: tooki on April 22, 2025, 07:37:19 pmI represent that remark, as I loves assembly language. (I really do, X86 flavor.)But seriously: BASIC was the first language I ever used, the first experience I had with a computer of any kind (on a Univac mainframe, green-screen terminals, then immediately afterwards on the first IBM PC w/cassette BASIC). It was a very good introduction to computing, so I agree with everyone here who's lamenting its passing as the language of first contact.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:20:28 pm
content: Quote from: floobydust on April 22, 2025, 07:19:57 pmI learned 'C' before Basic, and actually I have a different opinion from yourself. I found 'C' easier, PROVIDED you stay away from pointers (which you can). You can incorporate pointers later on, when you are reasonably proficient. 'C' just seemed more logical to me. Still, no accounting for taste.

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:21:56 pm
content: Quote from: floobydust on April 22, 2025, 07:19:57 pmI agree. I'm not a professional programmer, but I learned Fortran at university and then encountered BASIC in every job after I graduated. I even encountered BASIC in a Philips factory controlling a production machine.Today I write code in FreeBasic. It's a compiler rather than interpreter, and it produces tight code that executes just as fast as anything written in C++. Those snobs who frown upon BASIC should give FreeBasic a go.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:22:57 pm
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 22, 2025, 08:20:28 pmPerhaps yes (sort of brain), but I'd say BASIC is much more abstract than C, which after all is kind of just one step away from assembly language. Which makes BASIC a better starting language for those who are programming for the first time.

author: pdenisowski
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 08:58:44 pm
content: I still have my ZX81 and the BASIC programming guide that came with it.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:01:56 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 22, 2025, 08:09:10 pmI hand assembled and then entered the hex code into a Prolog EPROM programmer.My first experience with BASIC was in computer class on an Apple ][, so Microsoft BASIC, but later I had CBASIC on CP/M, then integer BASIC on the APPLE ][, and then Microsoft BASIC on CP/M.CBASIC was a more traditional environment where you edited a source file (In Wordstar's non-document mode!) and then compiled and executed. BASIC on the Apple ][ was probably the most fun, but only because I had all of the Beagle Bros utilities which allowed things like scrolling the listing backwards.I suspect that if I had had access to C at that time, my career path would have been completely different.

author: djsb
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:02:23 pm
content: I like to play around with code written in QBASIC, FreeBASIC and the BCX Basic to C translator. They are all good for prototyping code and trying out algorithms. BCX is particularly good as you can produce both console mode code and GUI code that uses the Windows API directly. You have the best of both worlds as you have your BASIC code and can then also look at the C code listing thats produced before it's compiled by Pelesc (that I prefer to use) or several other C compilers.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 09:29:39 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 22, 2025, 09:01:56 pmWordstar.. Ctrl K B Ctrl K K... Burned in to my skull... lol. We were still using this with the first IBM PCs. When we got those Six Pack Plus boards, Wordstar broke. I used Debug to hack the exe to get it working with the larger memory. One of the programmers I worked with was wanting to use C on the IBM PC. Two floppy drives. One for C, one for his work.My dual floppy, Televideo with CP/M, Wordstar and MBASIC running the original demo program. Fancy graphics.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:10:43 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 22, 2025, 09:29:39 pmThe only thing which stopped me from continuing to use Wordstar was long file names.

author: abeyer
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 22, 2025, 11:45:02 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 22, 2025, 08:18:31 pmTotally disagree on that. I think the video makes the right conclusion: It's nothing about BASIC itself, other than just being the right thing at the right time, that really was its legacy, but the people who learned from it. That there are even more better choices to learn from today isn't something to lament, but celebrate.

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 12:29:23 am
content: @floobydust:I lived in an IBM town in those days. I and my R&D tech (J.U.) had one of the very first IBM PC's available. Neither of us knew a thing about programming. We self-taught each other Basic and developed a program for reading replica-agar plates for bacterial ID and antimicrobial susceptibility testing. That program (probably with modifications after I moved to another job) was used until about 2010. That process used to take a tech almost the whole day. With the program, she was done by 10 AM. We used the function keys heavily (e.g., +, -, rest +, rest -...) and the keyboard had them in 2 columns on the left. That was very convenient. I still dislike having them at the top.Basic worked. Was easy to learn. And annoyed the computer elites at Harvard and MIT. What more could you ask for?

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 12:35:36 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 22, 2025, 06:47:38 pmBASIC was easy to use and it was an interpreted language meaning that each line of source code was read and then converted to machine language and then executed before repeating the process with the next line of source code. Most languages had to be compiled in several stages before they would finally yield a compiled program ( a .COM or ,EXE program on a PC) that could run by itself. Loading the compiler and the source code and the intermediate files took up a LOT of memory space when memory was still extremely expensive. Interpreted languages were much slower to run since each line had to be interpreted but they took up a lot less memory. IBM/Microsoft gave a copy of interpreted BASIC with each PC that they sold but they also sold a compiled version of BASIC and another BASIC compiler that made use of the 8087 Math Coprocessor. They also sold many other compiled languages (Cobol anyone? :-). Turbo Pascal by Borland was also an interpreted language and so was C-terp.I had a back ground in main frame computers before I went back to university so when I got there they put me in charge of the first IBM PC computer programming lab there. We were still running original IBM PCs with dual full height floppy drives and no hard drives at the time. Yeah, compiling programs was a bitch! Our computers only had 16k or 64k of memory and we had to constantly switch floppy disks in and out as the computer made and used all of the temporary files! And looked for all of the #include files that it needed! But we had a FULL set of programming languages from IBM/MicroSoft and I got proficient with pretty much all of them. And I still have original packages of just about all of them including compiled Fortran, Professional Fortran, Ryan McFarlan Fortran, both versions of compiled Basic, Cobol, USCD Pascal, APL, PolyForth, Turbo Pascal, IBM Assembler and I don't even recall the others.

author: mwb1100
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 12:53:13 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 23, 2025, 12:35:36 amTurbo Pascal was compiled directly to machine code. I can remember at my first computer-related job porting a program from UCSD Pascal (which compiled to an interpreted p-code) to Turbo Pascal. When built with UCSD Pascal the program required an overnight run to complete. The Turbo Pascal port ran so fast (a few minutes) that at first we were certain there was some serious bug.Turbo Pascal also performed its compilation very fast - so fast that it could be used as if it were interpreted for most purposes (there was no "REPL" - Read-Eval-Print Loop - as most interpreters have).

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 01:16:14 am
content: I don't think so. I'm pretty certain that I remember that it never yielded a .COM or .EXE program that could be run strictly by itself and you always had to run the TP program and then read the source code file into it before executing it. (Much the same as running a program under disc based BASIC). I think that Borland did later come out with a compiler but the original version (3.0 IIRC) was just an interpreter.You're right about the USCD Pascal. I only tried it a few times before switching to Turbo Pascal. At the time Borland was selling it for $39 to students and the USCD version was something like $499. In my university if you were on Comp Sci degree curriculum you started with Pascal. But for engineering types you started with Fortran. I only had one class that used BASIC and that was on an Apple II but I don't even remember what the class was or for which degree.BTW OP, you're wrong about every home computer using BASIC. I had an IBM 5100 that run both APL or BASIC from ROM at the flip of a switch!It was a trip!

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 01:26:11 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 23, 2025, 01:16:14 amIt could be (IIRC) toggled between compiling to memory (hence no exe/com files, but faster), or compiling to disk, which would then create the executable.Edit:From the manual (bold added by me):Quotehttps://electrickery.nl/comp/tp30/tp30_22.html

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 03:20:00 am
content: Bill's notes:https://www.gatesnotes.com/microsoft-original-source-codeThings are a bit fuzzy but I thought we had a BASIC compiler named BASCOM, that was provided by IBM that we ran on those early PCs. This was long before all the Borland turbo stuff. I was using MMS (Miller Micro Systems) FORTH.I thought all those Borland turbo (Pascal, basic...) compiled to an EXE.I demo'ed my PC with a Z80 ISA board that allowed me to boot CPM. Back in those days CP/M was still a contender for DOS.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 03:25:24 am
content: I have fond memories of QBasic and then PowerBASIC (formally Turbo Basic)I didn't use GW-BASIC much.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 03:31:56 am
content: My fond memories are of Atari Basic. I managed to make that Atari 800 machine do so many things ahead of its time. Though, very slow, I did learn some assembly to make up for the speed as well as compiled integer Basic which was also available at the time.I remember when I got my own home desired first audio sampler going. I created my first scanner from modified printer with lamp and photocell. I made a video sampler copied from a magazine. I also hand wired a 256k upgrade.Those were the days when nothing else in the world mattered one bit. Things like school were nothing more than a necessary side annoyance.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 03:47:06 am
content: I remember when I realized I could call a background exe to play music/sound effects in my PowerBasic apps.That was like a whole new world opening up. hahaI think the next language for me after PowerBasic was Delphi in win95/98, lots of fond memories there too and I still use Delphi 10 in for some stuff today.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 03:53:31 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 22, 2025, 08:22:57 pmI get your argument, but doesn't that lead to starting with Scheme / Lisp / Logo / Python (which are all about the same thing) or Smalltalk for that matter?I started with TI (58/59, I owned the more limited 57, price NZ$117 from David Reid Electronics in 1979) and HP (67/97) programmable calculators.My TI57 came with thishttps://archive.org/details/Makingtracksintoprogramming/a4compilation/mode/2upBy the time I got my hands on an actual computer BASIC seemed very inadequate and frustrating. I spent maybe two days with AppleSoft before teaching myself 6502 machine code programming from the (VERY) brief instruction set cheat-sheet and monitor ROM listing in the back of the manual. As with other people in this thread on 8080 and Z80 machines, I didn't have an assembler (until I wrote a simple one) so had to calculate hex opcodes and branch offsets etc by hand.I quickly got hold of a copy of Apple Pascal, which was nice but the environment was a little heavy for a 1 MHz 6502, not helped by the UCSD bytecode being ported from big computers and not designed to be a nice fit to the 6502. I then went on to Pascal generating native code on the PDP-11s and VAXen at University, and Modula 2. When Turbo Pascal hit on the university's Z80 and 8086 machines that was a revolution. The code generated wasn't great, but at least it was native code and the compiler was FAST.The availability of C came much later for me (none of these were running Unix) and really I skipped C at first, going straight from Object Pascal to early C++, on 68020 or 68030 Macs by the time that happened.To this day I prefer Algol / Pascal / Modula style syntax (and sh derivatives over csh) but C and Lisp syntax (which are about the same except C uses more kinds of brackets and puts them in a slightly different place) are perfectly acceptable too. Forth does my head in, but the slightly higher-level PostScript or HP calcultor's RPL (Reverse Polish Lisp) are fine -- it's not the RPN as such.I've reverted to doing mostly low-level programming, often on machines closer to a ZX81 than to an Apple ][ (though faster), often again in assembly language, or in C (not even C++, since C adopted most of the "Better C" features) as a more portable proxy for it -- where the preprocessor and things such as inttypes.h (including the PRIu32 etc printf macros) is responsible for the portability more than the C language itself. The GCC and LLVM toolchains, with the dozens of supported ISAs, are just too compelling not to use and while there are Pascal compilers that can target GCC and LLVM infrastructure they add friction.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 04:08:30 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 23, 2025, 12:35:36 amSo much misinformation here :-(Virtually all BASICs, certainly all the Microsoft ones (Apple, IBM PC etc) converted the BASIC code to a tokenised form when you entered it, and pretty-printed it when you did a "list". For example END, FOR, NEXT, DATA, INPUT were stored as 0x80, 0x81, 0x82, 0x83, 0x84 respectively while + - * / ; AND OR > = < were 0xC8, 0xC9, 0xCA, 0xCB, 0xCC, 0xCD, 0xCE, 0xCF, 0xD0, 0XD1.These BASICs were not converted to machine code instructions, the tokens were simply interpreted.Turbo Pascal, on the other hand, was directly compiled to 8080 or 8086 machine code with no visible intermediate form.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 04:22:37 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 23, 2025, 01:16:14 amThe school I went to had a College of Business and a College of Engineering.The biz students all wrote in COBOL, the engineers in FORTRAN (but there were already some students using LISP and even the Honeywell computer's native PL/1 or whatever it was, forget exactly ATM).Biz students all started on BASIC (both on Univac and IBM PCs) as I remember, then switched to COBOL.

author: brucehoult
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 04:24:05 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 23, 2025, 01:16:14 amThe original version of Turbo Pascal was, quite logically, 1.0 (in November 1983) not 3.0 which came out in 1985 (2 was skipped, idk why). And it was a direct-to-machine code compiler right from the start. I was using it on a DEC Rainbow in 1984, on both the Z80 and the 8088 CPUs.Particularly amusing was that when an executing program encountered a runtime error (e.g. index out of bounds), Turbo Pascal showed you the line of Pascal code that caused the error by compiling the program all over again until it found the line of code that generated the instructions where the error was found.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 04:27:56 am
content: Quote from: brucehoult on April 23, 2025, 04:24:05 amOriginally, it wasn't actually even called Turbo Pascal.Quotehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo_Pascal

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 06:07:56 am
content: Quote from: SteveThackery on April 22, 2025, 08:20:28 pmOf course. Critique against C is well deserved, but BASIC is truly a horrible language. It is - too basic. If C needs to be criticized and suggested replacing by some old, existing, "better" language, at very least we could suggest something like Pascal instead, not BASIC. BASIC is a dead end, various attempts to use it as beginner-friendly MCU language (BASIC Stamp etc.) failed to gain traction. Arduino was successful even with it's choice of C++ subset.Using a "real" language over a "separate beginner language" has obvious benefits. Many beginners alsowantto learnthe real things. Like, we rather learn to ride a bicycle (possibly with training wheels first, compare this to the Arduino's preprocessor) as soon as we can, instead of a plastic toy that cannot be used to go from place A to place B.

author: NE666
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 08:24:56 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 23, 2025, 06:07:56 amI agree with this, although I'd dispute that BASIC was terrible, at least in terms of outcomes. It was a product of its time and it allowed millions of people to cut their teeth and have some fun whilst doing it, before moving on to other languages.I'm surprised more hasn't been said so far about Python as a BASIC killer. I could rage against a lot of it (I don't consider any high level language without strong typing as a 'proper' one, nor one with meaningful whitespace in control of flow. YMMV). However, elementary Python is as accessible as BASIC and when you're ready to move on in terms of complexity and real world problems, the runway in front of you is vastly longer. If I were teaching programming to non-programmers today, I'd certain choose it over BASIC. Which is why I think that the latter has fallen along the wayside as it has.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 08:25:19 am
content: I realize BASIC was the killer app for these early personal computers. I remember it was expensive.Pricing1975/12:Altair Extended BASIC: $350 ($150 if an 8800 purchased plus 12K RAM plus I/O board)Altair 8K BASIC: $200: ($75 if an 8800 purchased plus 8K RAM plus I/O board)Altair 4K BASIC: $150: ($60 if an 8800 purchased plus 4K RAM plus I/O board)Altair 8800 kit $439, assembled $621CPU board $310 kit $360 assembled.1976 $100 is worth $562 today.So you can see Gates had the pricing high- no wonder it was widely copied and likely the first pirated software lol.EE's are free I guess for the hours they spent on schematics, with tape laying out a PC board etc vs. hours writing code. We should have seen the writing on the wall.edit: checked and TI 99/4A extended BASIC cartridge was about half the price of the computer circa 1983.No greater fun could be had CALL SPRITE and the sound options as well, programming video games in colour.

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 08:43:13 am
content: QuotePerhaps originally true (on microcomputers, anyway), but not for that long. By the time you got to the original IBM PC, it was saving your source. It may have done a pre-compilation to byte codes when you typed "run", but your original formatting stuck around...I think BASIC's big problem was a lack of standardization.From the original Dartmouth BASIC where all you had was "if <statement> then <linenumber>" (and FOR/NEXT loops, I guess) to rather nicer modern BASICs with arbitrary statements or even blocks, with ELSE and everything! Some were floating-point only, some were integer only, some didn't have strings, and almost all were full of special keywords for dealing with the particular system that they had been customized for. (I was particularly bemused that the original IBM PC BASICA had better support for COM ports than the BIOS did.) Not to mention the 'standardization' of PEEK/POKE as a way to actually do the neat things. Sigh.I guess Python is the modern equivalent. But SO depressinglybigger.QuoteSOMEBASICs were pretty terrible. :-(Getting run time errors is swell, but ... having to look up the 2-letter error codes that Altair BASIC would give you must have been pretty unpleasant. (Especially if you didn't buy it and didn't have the manual!)

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 08:58:46 am
content: The early home computers usually came with a basic interpreter. This makes it different from many modern languages: the use of basic and the use of an interpreter. With the limited mass storrage, like cassete tape a compiler was a bit tricky to use. There were some early compilers: at school we used a pascal compiler on PETs. Though this was already with floppy drives.The Basic is not that bad for programming normal programs. It just missed some parts for low level stuff. The support for graphics was a bit non standadized if present at all. Even today it is not bad for an interpreter. Python adds quite some quirks and complications on top.If you want to compare to C, keep in mind that this was before ISO C. The original C&R C is quite a bit more horrible than the modern ISO C, C99 or newer versions. The logical alternative to basic at that time was Pascal - though it often also missed the low level and sometimes graphics / sound parts.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 09:32:12 am
content: Python is a very interesting case study because it's a full-blown modern day Software Science compatible language with all the wonkiness, dynamic typing, OO, and library versioning mess that makes it have quite steep learning curve. And yet beginners are totally fine with it. Just like beginners are fine with C, with different kind of wonkiness (array vs pointer footguns, zero-terminated strings, integer promotion / type conversion rules etc).We easily underestimate beginners. Almost all projects that try to design something "simple" for "beginners" fail. Arduino tries to be "simple" for "beginners" but still picked one of the most complicated languages known to the human kind, C++. And yet, beginners are fine with it. Probably because beginners want to use what the "big boys" are using, and don't care about what academics think would be "best for beginners".

author: NE666
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 10:28:50 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 23, 2025, 09:32:12 amBecause even a gilded cage is still a prison.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 12:35:22 pm
content: No, Turbo Pascal was NEVER an interpreter.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 12:49:57 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 23, 2025, 12:35:22 pmQuick search looks like it is available. Should run in a DosBox.https://winworldpc.com/product/turbo-pascal/7x

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 01:12:05 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on April 22, 2025, 07:01:58 pmWhich is what made it such a roaring success - the company didn't even last a year, from memory, I remember reviews at the time that were essentially "WTF?" stretched out into a full-length article.

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 01:17:41 pm
content: Quote from: brucehoult on April 23, 2025, 03:53:31 amSpeaking of David Reid, is my memory correct in thinking they didn't put prices on components and you had to go up to the counter to find out how much something cost? It always struck me as a bizarre way to run a business, probably one of the reasons they disappeared as soon as Dick Smith came along.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 01:22:35 pm
content: A Basic Interpreter, with ONLY 128 bytes of RAM available. Of which, only 64 bytes could be used for the actual program. No keyboard (used gamepads or similar), and max value of variables was 99.Doesn't sound good.Warning: The webpage, might inconvenience your eyes (I don't appreciate their colour choices).https://huguesjohnson.com/programming/atari-2600-basic/

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 01:41:36 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 23, 2025, 12:49:57 pmV7 was the latest released TP I think. You can find earlier versions without a problem. Such as TP 3.0 for CP/M:https://techtinkering.com/2013/03/05/turbo-pascal-a-great-choice-for-programming-under-cpm/

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 02:38:17 pm
content: Quote from: MK14 on April 23, 2025, 01:22:35 pmThat's insane...WHY?

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 02:41:48 pm
content: Atari Basic inferring an AI neuronet doing optical character recognition (OCR).https://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/an-atari-800-1-7mhz-6502-computer-infering-a-neuronet/msg5348747/#msg5348747

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 02:51:25 pm
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 23, 2025, 02:38:17 pmAt the time there was (IIRC) a huge market for Atari 2600 games and software (cartridges). Atari were probably worried about the big explosion of Basic Interpreted, home computers, flooding the market.I suppose, as an initial teaching aid, it might just work.But limiting variables to 99, just seems so limiting. Also, just a maximum of 9 lines of code.I have to scratch my head, to even think what they could write, with such severe limitations.What I think they should have done, is put in extra hardware into the cartridge, to allow a sensible basic interpreter to be able to exist. Such as by adding some kind of RAM chip(s), to the bus, if technically possible.

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 03:04:09 pm
content: For the first learing steps a limited system can be convenient. I did my first µC programming with Tiny26 AVR, with 128 bytes of RAM and 2 kB of flash for the program. My actual first useful program was only some 60 words = 120 bytes long and did not even use any of the RAM (just the CPU registers).In the early days they also had combined IO/RAM chips to provide a tiny bit of RAM (like the 128 bytes).HP even had a multi-user computer (HP250) that was limited to Basic. AFAIK and the response from HP, there as no compiler available, just the build in Basic interpreter.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 03:14:23 pm
content: Quote from: Kleinstein on April 23, 2025, 03:04:09 pmYes, machine code/assembly code (which I assume you were using), can be amazingly efficient.One of my first computers (depending on definitions), a Sinclair (Science of Cambridge) MK14. ONLY had about 256 bytes of RAM. For both the program, variables and stack space (if it had any stack).But, it is enough for surprisingly capable, small programs. Such as a version of moon (lunar) lander.1 KB RAM, for things like a Sinclair ZX80/1, is perfectly usable, for many things.But just 128 bytes, is rather tight, for a basic interpreter (assuming the interpreter itself, can be in ROM).

author: fzabkar
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 05:35:36 pm
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 23, 2025, 02:38:17 pmI'm red-green colour-blind. I don't know what colour-sighted people see, but the choice of colours on that web site is annoying.

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 05:53:39 pm
content: In the early days of home computers ROM was relatively cheap, once the volume was reasonable. On the other side mass storage was often limited - a floppy disk was already and optional relatively expensive extra. So the OS and basic interpreter was usually in ROM that came with the machine.With direct execution of Basic commands the Basic interpreter did parts of the OS jobs (selecting programs to run, set system time / date, handle interfaces).Except for the very few Altairs microsoft did not suffer that much from illegal copies - that mask ROMs were usually licensed (maybe except those in the comunist block). The programs really effected by illegal copies were games.

author: Picuino
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 06:20:04 pm
content: Sinclair ZX Spectrum, one of the first affordable home computers in Europe in 80s.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX_Spectrum16kB of ROM and 16kB of RAM (including video memory). With that size of ROM, what other simple language for most could have been installed?

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 07:49:07 pm
content: I think Basic is still quite good programming language. I had ZX81/ZX Spectrum/Atari520STM/PC1251 and all were programmed in Basic (eg. 8051/52 mcus ran MS Basic too). Even the Atari520 had a GW or GB Basic "compiler" I worked with. I cannot remember using C or something else at that time (80ties) at home, except assembler, especially the 68k asm in Atari with its PDP11-like mnemonics.. I liked 68k much, I still do not understand why Intel's 8086 took the lead and not the Motorola 68k.There were some attempts with Forth, experiments with Lisp.. Afaik Pascal came with PCs and CP/M machines which were still pretty expensive for home usage in eighties (equipped with floppies and hdds).

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 09:15:20 pm
content: In 1982, I hocked my car and bought a Kaypro II computer. I don't recall it coming with Basic, though I did come up with a Basic program fairly soon. CP/M 80 operating system, Zilog Z80 processor. At the time I bought it, the options for compiler languages on hobbyist single-board computers was fairly limited, and Basic was rather available. I suspect that's why it became ubiquitous. In college, I had learned Fortran in engineering school, and Basic was not a huge transition from that in terms of its weakly typed, bottom-up logical structure.I had immediately subscribed to Micro Cornucopia, the main magazine for hard-core single-board computer hobbyists in the 80's. Through that magazine, I found Structured Basic, or SBASIC, which was a compiled, procedural version of Basic. That was a game-changer for me, and I immediately wrote some traffic analysis software for it to give myself an excuse to learn it. Compiling that 2000-line program took about 45 minutes. During that time, I discovered the bookPascal With Styleby Harry Ledgard, and after reading knew why I had been so attracted to SBASIC--the top-down approach fit my pattern of thinking. I wanted Pascal from that moment, but at the time, the only version of Pascal generally available was the UCSD p-code pseudo-compiler, which was grossly too expensive.The next year, Philippe Khan burst onto the scene with Turbo Pascal. If it was called something before that, it was kept secret. The first Turbo Pascal was a single-page ad in Byte Magazine that Khan had to hock his life savings to fund, or something like that. I bought it the day I first heard about it, and I still have the blue-cover original Turbo Pascal reference manual that came in that fifty-buck package. Pascal was a game changer for me--a strictly typed, highly procedural, top-down structured language that could actually be used for commercial programming in an orderly way. I did my graduate research using it, and the analysis program was interesting enough that my committee allowed me to count the program as part of the word count and publish it in detail in the thesis.From that, I moved on to Borland Pascal in the PC environment, and learned to write object-oriented, event-driven (rather than procedural) Pascal programs. Two such made me a decent amount of money back in the day, as a side hustle from my day job. Then, Windows emerged dominant and I knew that I had to choose between programming and doing the engineering that I was programming about. I chose the latter and have not regretted that choice.All that to lead to this: Very early in grad school (which was doing at night in addition to my full-time day job), Niklaus Wirth came to the University of Texas to give a guest lecture that I attended. There were perhaps a thousand of us at that lecture. He asked, How many of you learned to write programs with Fortran or Basic? 90% of the people raised their hands. "You can leave now. You have been permanently and irreparably brain damaged."So much for Basic.Rick "hasn't written a Pascal Program in 17 or 18 years" Denney

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 09:27:26 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 23, 2025, 09:15:20 pmYeah, it seems Niklaus Wirth was a good salesman as well..Quote from: iMo on April 23, 2025, 07:49:07 pmPascal to implement into the cheaper small home machines was not easy in eighties as it was a compiler with several passes. The first home machines capable of running Pascal were perhaps Amigas, Ataris with floppies and hdds, and CP/M machines with one or two floppies or hdds (so from mid eighties up).

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 09:41:31 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 23, 2025, 09:15:20 pmHere is a video, where Mr "Turbo Pascal, Borland". Explains, very roughly in the middle of it. Where the previous compiler(s), get put into the Turbo Pascal.What they (Philippe Kahn) seem to say/explain, is that it is the IDE, which they created/added to the original pre-turbo-pascal variants, which 'finished off' the turbo pascal project, and made it what it was to become.So on reflection, I'm reasonably happy to agree that it all started out with Turbo Pascal. Because the prior product, was more of a stand alone, command line compiler. Rather than a complete (IDE) project.Because without the IDE. It would be tricky for complete beginners, to easily use it to make pascal programs.Even with the original turbo pascal. Later versions, such as 7.0 (i.e. the so called blue-screened IDE ones). Were easier to use and more capable. Because the IDE was almost or partly like a windows application, rather than a pure command line version.

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 10:00:35 pm
content: Ai told me the Apple II with a 5.25in floppy disk could run UCSD Pascal since 1978 with manual swapping the floppies.. Experts may verify..QuoteWiki: The original retail price of the computer was .. US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) (with the maximum 48 KB of RAM)..So not a typical home computer, imho..

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 10:22:15 pm
content: Bill Gates taking Dartmouth's open-source BASIC and porting it over to the Altair - I wonder how much truth is in that.Interesting readHistory of BASICChap. 50Anyone know the truth to this I found: There apparently was "a patch for Altair 8K Ver. 4.0 and Altair Extended Ver. 4.0 BASIC to allow these to run on a Z80.Altair BASIC “has as part of its routines several occasions where the parity flag is checked as part of the function. In the Z80 the parity flag indicates OVERFLOW during math routines, not parity."1985 TP ad for those needing a good cry :'(

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 11:12:53 pm
content: Quote from: iMo on April 23, 2025, 07:49:07 pmThe reason why the 68k lost is described in this video:'68000 - The CPU ahead of its time'Understand, it had a serious long run for the basic original 16bit version.

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 23, 2025, 11:18:18 pm
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 23, 2025, 03:20:00 amYeah, definitely! At least Turbo Pascal, anyway. I don't remember, and never used, a Borland Basic. Turbo Pascal was a true native code compiler, and extremely fast.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 01:14:58 am
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 23, 2025, 03:20:00 amI had a Baby Blue Z-80 card for the PC and it also ran CPM. I didn't get until after MS-DOS was king so I played with it for a bit and then got rid of it. But I'mstillkicking myself for that!

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 02:17:45 am
content: The early Amiga OSs, 1.1 thru 1.3 had 'Amiga Basic'. It no longer used line numbers and could run fast enough for extra simple games or graphics as it was interpreted.For my Amiga, I used AC/Basic instead, a Basic compiler. It was fast enough for writing some simple graphic games like pacman or tetris.A far cry from my Atari 800 basic's line number system.On my Atari 800, I also used the ABC Basic compiler and I think the other compiler I used was called MMG BASIC Compiler. One had full Atari Basic compatibility while the other one was super fast with an integer only mode.

author: Smokey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 02:56:26 am
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 23, 2025, 09:32:12 amIf I had to guess what percentage of Arduino users actually write code that uses C++ exclusive features, my guess would be 0.1%.The other 99.9% of Arduino programs are:loop(){someSensorLibIDidntCreate.read();delay(500);digitalWrite(LED,HIGH);delay(500);digitalWrite(LED,LOW);}

author: srb1954
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 08:05:46 am
content: Quote from: 5U4GB on April 23, 2025, 01:17:41 pmI think David Reid was originally a trade-only supplier and pricing was only calculated at the counter at the completion of an order pick. Maybe these practices carried over when David Reid first opened up to public sales.I have memories during my high school days of feeling very privileged to be allowed to go around the Christchurch David Reid trade warehouse (which was an old house converted into a rabbit warren with component shelving on every wall) and pick an order for my school radio club. it truly seemed like I was visiting Wonderland.

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 08:05:53 am
content: Quote from: Smokey on April 24, 2025, 02:56:26 amAnd that very example uses features e.g. in C++ but not in C. That shows that you can use a complicated language if you otherwise design the ecosystem such that libraries are available and easy to use, which is pretty much independent of the language. C++ specifically has a long tradition with huge number of overly complicated libraries (e.g. see Boost), nearly unmaintainable projects that are too elegantly designed and written by teams of hundreds of people.And yet, Arduino uses C++ and is still simple to use. So clearly C++ isn'tthatbad, it's all about the development culture more than the language itself.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 08:48:09 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 24, 2025, 02:17:45 amDontcha mean "compiled"?

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 09:04:31 am
content: The amiga basic was still an interpreter. It was reasonable fast as the CPU (68K) was faster then older home computers and The Amiga OS was also quite efficient compared to DOS on the PCs.The Amiga basic was an MS product, that in good tradition did not care obout OS conventions and used only 24 bit addressing and used the upper 8 bits for somehing else. This made is incompatible with more the 16 MB or Memory space, as used with the A3000 A4000. So it did not come with OS3.As a kind of replacement they had ARexx, kind of a predecessor to Phython. AFAIK it Rexx also come with IBMs OS2. It was a really funny languish with later evaluation.

author: dave j
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 01:31:18 pm
content: Quote from: Kleinstein on April 24, 2025, 09:04:31 amAmiga OS had ARexx because TRIPOS had Rexx. The Amiga DOS bits of Amiga OS were literally the corresponding bits of TRIPOS (written in BCPL, they were later rewritten in C for Amiga OS version 2.0 upwards). The Amiga OS and TRIPOS kernels are very similar so adding support for large chunks of TRIPOS code was relatively easy. When Amiga OS needed a scripting language, the existence of the TRIPOS version made it an easy choice.Rexx originated at IBM. It has some really weird features. e.g. The value of an uninitialised variable is a string of the variable's name in uppercase. This makes finding typos in programs extra fun.

author: Circlotron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 02:02:20 pm
content: I've been using QB64 Phoenix Edition for a year or so. Compiles to an executable and is super fast. Backward compatible with many older basics. Handles 64 bit integers.https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/index.php

author: Refrigerator
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 02:23:53 pm
content: Quote from: IanB on April 22, 2025, 07:23:59 pmYeah, i loved writing programs in Ti-BASIC on my TI-82. Helped me a bunch in math classes when we did trigonometry and had a few formulas that we kept using over and over and over again.Then later with integrals and derivatives and all that.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 02:28:49 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 24, 2025, 08:48:09 amActually, no. The first Amiga Basic allowed realtime breaks, variable editing, printing, forcefully pop-ing while and for loops, or jump to a line of code.I do not know how the internals worked, but you cannot definitely do this with a compiled executable.It operated with 2 windows, 1 for running and output, one which was like a text editor holding your code.Think of it like an early attempt of using a modern compiler with trace, step and debug, or like an in-circuit emulator running your C code on a MCU with break, step, edit regs and trace.A great sacrifice in speed was the cost and with only a 7MHz cpu and 512k ram for most, Amiga Basic was dropped as third party Basic compilers ran circles around it as their compilation time was only a few seconds. In my case, when I passed the 68030 stage, the compile time was a blink of an eye. This was 1 reason to avoid C compilers for simple utility stuff as those would always take much more time to compile until >25Mhz 68040s we on the scene.

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 04:22:34 pm
content: I used the Turbo Pascal editor as a general text editor in the CP/M OS for a long time, and even though I also had Wordstar for that computer. It was lean and fast, and had good tools for pretty printing. (I used the Wordstar for my 150-page thesis, and it was a God-send, notwithstanding the days it took to print on a Royal daisy-wheel printer--laser printers were still tens of thousands of dollars and utterly unavailable to me.)That notion of writing an IDE to go around command-line software was one that I copied myself. Me and another guy wrote an IDE to wrap around a compiled Fortran program that was used for traffic signal timing back in the day, so that the user had a workable data-entry editor with error detection and validation, plus a way to display the results. We actually took the 133-column output of the Fortran program (designed for the line printers of the day) and reformatted it into 80-column output for screen display and printing on cheap dot-matrix printers like the Okidata printer I bought with my Kaypro. But that software ran on PC-DOS and we were using the (first) PC-DOS version of Turbo Pascal for that package, originally on a Compaq computer (the first one--the suitcase portable--and the first IBM PC clone on the market). That would have been 1984 and 1985.In the late 80's, I wrote a commercial package that ran on MSDOS as text-mode software but with a windows-like GUI using "Turbo Pascal with Objects". That one was event-driven rather than procedural, which was a new concept for me. That would have been maybe 1989-1990. I followed that up with data acquisition software that used yet a different text-mode GUI concept, but it could plot data on the screen by using the Ghostscript interpreter of Postscript. I wrote the Pascal program to generate a Postscript program for both printing and on-screen graphical display. Postscript was a stack-oriented page description language with quite decent computational features. I loved working with Postscript.Then, Windows 3.0 came out and all the fun went bye-bye. Now, when I mess with Linux, it's no longer fun, so even though I might transition a couple of old computers to Linux to keep them useful (given that they can't be upgraded to Win11) I have no love for the old Unix-like command lines. My first of those used UCSD Unix for a traffic control system integration package we developed when I lived in Texas. That was NOT fun.I tried to write programs in C++ because it had become dominant, but it provided ten options for every one thing Pascal would do, and I was just too slow to be productive. My last Pascal program was data-collection software that I used for some research back about 17 or 18 years ago. I used Free Pascal--it had been 15 years since I'd written software and anything Borland was, of course, long gone. I had forgotten too much by that time and it was a struggle, but it got the job done and I doubt I could have done it as quickly or cheaply any other way.I'm happy to let the young guys pull the repeated all-nighters that I used to pull when I was in coding mode. I bought Jolt Cola in those days by the case.Rick "all the sugar and twice the caffeine" Denney

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 04:33:54 pm
content: When talking the Atari STs (68k) - I added 512kB of dram and around 1988 I ran Spice on it. I got a ~360kB binary on a diskette and with 1MB ram it worked fine. I cannot remember how they did it, but we tested it carefully and all the results were spot on (compared to results from other bodies). The original Spice at that time was written in Fortran. Perhaps there was Fortran compiler available for the 68k/AtariST. I even wrote a graphical interface which plotted the numerical results into graphs (GW basic or GFa basic or how it was called at that time).

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 05:07:31 pm
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 23, 2025, 11:12:53 pmYep, the biggest tragedy in IT history..

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 05:41:31 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 24, 2025, 04:22:34 pmAnd I use Delphi to this day. It is still being developed and has a significant user base.The only thing that really bugs me about Delphi is the requirement to type 'begin' and 'end' all over the place instead of curly brackets, {}.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 05:49:07 pm
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 23, 2025, 11:12:53 pmThe biggest problem was IBM's selection of the 8088 instead of the 68000, but there were good reasons for this:1. The 8088 was an 8086 with 8-bit external bus, making the system less expensive. Memory width was halved, and 8-bit peripherals could be used. Motorola did not see any need for the 68008 until it was too late.2. Dealing with Motorola was a pain.3. Intel was willing to allow second sources.4. The 8086 provided backward compatibility with the existing 8080 base of software.Later the 68000 ISA created huge problems for more advance processors, like double indirect addressing.The video discusses some things which are questionable:It says the 68k had forward compatibility, but this was not true or limited because the ISA kept changing in minor ways to correct flaws. For instance the 68000 did not preserve state during all exceptions, so could not recover. Later models corrected this but there was a computer system which provided for correct exception handling on the 68000 by running two processors in lockstep with one behind the other.The lack of memory management through page tables ended up being a disadvantage compared to the 8086, but this would not matter for early adoption. Flat memory is great for DMA, but horrible for security. Nothing prevented using DMA with the 8086, and the IBM PC included it.

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 07:09:14 pm
content: Quote from: iMo on April 24, 2025, 04:33:54 pmProspero's Pro-Fortran-77 ran on the Atari ST, apparently, so it would have been possible for a company to provide an Atari version of a Fortran program.I didn't recall it until just now, but the ST used the GEM gui, which was the basis for the GEM Desktop that came with (unusual for the day) WYSIWYG Ventura Publisher. I used Ventura Publisher to typeset large documents in the late 80's and early 90's, including user manuals, standard specifications documents, and brochures for various purposes. It was one of the doomed alternatives to the emerging Windows.Rick "remembering when Digital Research, IBM, and other big-name mainframe and minicomputer companies were serious about PCs" Denney

author: srb1954
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 11:00:22 pm
content: Quote from: iMo on April 23, 2025, 07:49:07 pmI think the 8086 series won out due to the use of the 8088 in the IBM PC and the high productions volumes that this brought. I also think that the adoption of the 8088 by IBM may have been greatly influenced by some predatory pricing from Intel to buy into the application.At the time that the IBM PC would have been in design I was tasked by my department manager to look at Intel chips for a new product. I was surprised by the considerable price difference between the 8086 and the 8088 chips. Despite the internals of these chips being very similar the 8086 was priced at 3x the price of the 8088. This is all the more surprising considering that the 8088 had only just been introduced and, back in those days, newly introduced chips usually carried a price premium until early production issues were sorted and the yield brought up to adequate levels.If the 8088 had not existed at such a low price at the time and the comparison had only been between the 8086 and the 68000 I think it would have been a much fairer fight and we might not have been saddled with the 8086 family and all its architectural deficiencies.

author: srb1954
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 11:54:16 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 24, 2025, 05:49:07 pmThis was really only a consideration for smaller systems where your memory requirements could be covered using only one EPROM or one RAM chip. For larger systems where you need more than one chip the memory width problem is much less significant and you get double the memory bandwidth as a bonus. The only remaining problem is PCB design where it is more difficult routing 16-bit buses than 8-bit buses.QuoteI always found it the other way round; getting full and complete documentation from Motorola was easy whereas getting anything out of Intel was like extracting teeth without an anaesthetic. However, a lot of it may have come down to the performance of the local sales rep as our Motorola sales rep was top notch and the Intel sales rep much less so.QuoteThe 68000 was had a number of second sources available so I don't think this was much of a problem initially. Later on the more advanced Motorola processors and peripheral chips were not as widely second sourced.QuoteA dubious benefit. I wonder how much 8080 S/W was really reused in 8086 designs. I have always found that the reuse of existing S/W, particularly assembly language, is minimal in new products.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 24, 2025, 11:55:25 pm
content: Quote from: srb1954 on April 24, 2025, 11:00:22 pmI forgot to mention it, but the multiplexed address and data bus on the 8086/8088 made for a less expensive 40-pin package compared to the 64-pin 68000. Later this would not matter because the package price fell.Demultiplexing requires between 2 and 5 8-bit TTL ICs depending on how much buffering is desired, which is less than the cost difference between the packages.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:08:07 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 24, 2025, 01:14:58 amYou should have sent it my way. I am a sucker for old, unique electronics.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:09:32 am
content: A better question might be why none of the home PC alternatives used the 8088 instead of the 68000 after the 6502. There were some 8088/8086 systems which were not quite IBM PC compatible, that ran some variation of CP/M-86, but they were all intended as business systems. I had a friend who had one made, or at least sold, by Heathkit, which I believe had GWBASIC?Quote from: srb1954 on April 24, 2025, 11:54:16 pmThe number of EPROMs or SRAMs was halved. DRAM at the time was usually 1-bit wide, so the difference was between 8 and 16 DRAMs, and the memory granularity was halved as well.It was possible to use an 8086 to make an IBM PC compatible system, but required some additional external logic to swap halves of the external bus to get the same memory map.QuoteI never had a problem with documentation from either, but I sure had problems getting chips out of Motorola. This is different if you are a major customer, or so I assumed at the time, but even then it seemed like Motorola did not take large customers seriously if they were new. If IBM had waited for the 68008, they would have been delayed for at least a year. I think it would have been more like 2 years.QuoteIntel committed to a second source and their earlier chips were already second sourced. I do not remember the 68000 being second sourced originally.The difference could simply have been that Motorola was much larger than Intel, so did not feel a need to make any accommodations. Intel was more interested in making a deal.QuoteAll of the CP/M applications were potentially available, with Wordstar being a big one, but there was more than one spreadsheet as well. I remember the time when computer swap meets were dominated by CP/M, and CP/M business applications were a big deal.

author: floobydust
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:22:15 am
content: Processor wars in the 70's and 80's -it would be very hard to know the details because it was a massive boom time. Cost, clock speed, market release date, politics are all factors.Motorola priced their CPUs at a premium which is one reason others took over. 6800 vs 6502 especially as Woz mentioned I recall.The 68000 is slow in the number of clock cycles (including DTACK) which was great with slow memory but it did not scale up in clock speed like it needed to, and I think this is one reason as well as cost, that it got steamrolled despite being superior to that Intel stuff. Intel were always assholes with databooks and supply.edit: I didn't know there was an overlap with the 68k:Intel 8086 released 1978.Motorola 68000 released 1979.Intel 80286 released 1982.Intel 80386 released 1985.Intel 80486 released 1989.First Processor Wars: 8080, Z80, 6800, 6502. {to 1977}. Intel 8080 successor 8085 released 1977.NEC V20 (announced 1985) gave the 8088 price pressure. {these are dates I've found, let me know if they are wrong}.-------------------Stumbled onto this and had to laugh at what business EE's are in:1977 Interview with Ed Roberts of MITS {Altair 8800 design Spring 1974source pt1/2}"... Getting back to the high volume calculator business, what was the single most important factor in ruining that for Mits?"The thing that ruined that for everyone was a characteristic of the electronic companies to become prostitutes."How do you mean?"It turns out to be a big price war and the net effect is that nobody makes any money. To still have a viable company after having been in the calculator business was success. If you could just live through it, you were successful."

author: rsjsouza
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 12:57:38 am
content: All versions of "Turbo"-anything that I ever used generated compiled code. Even Turbo Basic 1.0, which my own copy follows attached.Quote from: SteveThackery on April 23, 2025, 11:18:18 pm

author: nigelwright7557
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:55:27 am
content: Quote from: IanB on April 22, 2025, 07:23:59 pmBASIC was used as it doesnt need a lot of ROM. I believe one micro had a 4K BASIC ROM !BASIC is still alive in Visual BASIC although its vastly expanded BASIC.I tend to use C as I do a lot of PIC programming.I use C# for Windows programming.As I have used C for about 40 years I dont make too many mistakes now.

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 06:39:10 am
content: QuoteYou're kidding, right? IBM PC: 1981. First IBM PC Clones: 1982.I had an HP150. Ran MSDOS, but not PC compatible.

author: woofy
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:46:00 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 24, 2025, 05:49:07 pmAt the assembly level yes, it was not binary compatible, but that was enough.At the time I was selling an 8031/51 assembler running on Z80 CP/M machines. It was written in Z80 assembly language and I used a translator to convert it to 8086 assembly. After re-assembly I had an IBM PC version as well. I suspect a lot of early PC software was generated like this.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:02:10 am
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 24, 2025, 05:49:07 pmOnly at the assembler language level. There were a couple of minor differences at the binary level; I forget the details.As you say, the number of pins (on the processor, bus, memory) very significantly affected the production costs.Motorola wanted clear market differentiation between its 8-bit processors (6800/6809) and its 16-bit processors. IBM didn't want anybody to get the ridiculous idea that cheap desktop calculators might be a substitute for real computers; hence the PC was almost a skunk works effort.Those lead to the delay creating 68008 processors and 8086 PCs.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:09:11 am
content: Quote from: nigelwright7557 on April 25, 2025, 01:55:27 amThe first computer I used had a famous Algol-60 compiler that fitted in 4K words. The machine was 8K architectural maximum, 276µs minimum instruction time.See one working athttps://www.tnmoc.org/elliott-brothers-computers, and discuss the schematics with the people there written by Tony Hoare, who also made other significant advances and one infamous mistake.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:42:10 am
content: In the first or second semester at Uni we had exams from programming, where we had to demonstrate our Algol and Fortran proficiency. I remember vividly the scene, where my colleague, pissed-off of the entire situation (we were waiting in a line at the Uni computer center with perhaps 10cm thick bunches of punch cards in hands usually getting results in the next day best case) he was pretty gesticulating (because of deadlines) such his heap of cards dropped on the floor and he had to assemble the entire work again. His frustration was mainly supported on the fact he was a proud owner of the newest pocket Sharp PC-1500 Basic computer at that time already, and he carried it always in his bag..

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:22:09 am
content: Quote from: srb1954 on April 24, 2025, 08:05:46 amAh, that would explain it, thanks. Made it really difficult for hobbyist kids who didn't know what they'd get charged until they got to the counter and then had to figure out what to take back because they couldn't afford it.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:28:34 am
content: Quote from: iMo on April 25, 2025, 09:42:10 amNever used punched cards, and while at school the turnaround would have been a week - via post.Did use 5 channel paper tape, with the wretched letter-shift figure-shift necessary for >31 characters. Two fingered thumping on ASCII ASR33s was wonderful by comparison, and touch typing on Silent 700s / DecWriters was nirvana.Now we've regressed to two-finger tickling using letter-shift figure-shift symbol-shift on fondleslabs

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 11:31:50 am
content: Quote from: iMo on April 24, 2025, 04:33:54 pmThe story of the 1MB ST ("Mega ST") was interesting, it was available in Europe but I had to get a US one for some reason I can't remember and was asked how I'd found out about a secret unreleased product, because (then) West Germany had it a long time before the US did.

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:19:05 pm
content: Quote from: westfw on April 25, 2025, 06:39:10 amI think he explicitely meant home computers that were NOT IBM PC or PC compatible. The fact he said "home PC" has probably confused you. PC means "personal computer" and I'm sure that's what he meant here, and not "IBM PC", otherwise obviously that wouldn't have made any sense.And he's right: very few "personal computers", apart from the IBM PC and compatibles, used the 8088/8086.The Z80 was still ubiquitous along with the 6502, a bit of 6809 and then the 68000 for the more powerful machines.I think it was just a matter of market. There was no real market for the 8088/86 apart from the IBM PC and its compatibles. It usually required more glue logic than the 8-bitters, making designs around them more expensive, and didn't provide enough performance gain to justify it. It could address more RAM OTOH, although with quirks (but at least those quirks didn't require external banking schemes), but RAM was still expensive in early 80s and anything over 64 KB was luxury for home computers.Although I don't know how much it cost back then, I also suspect the 8088/86 were significantly more expensive than 8-bitters while the 68000 was likely a better deal if you consider the performance/price ratio.But sure enough, without the IBM PC, the "x86" CPUs may have not lived long. They didn't attract that much market apart from IBM PC/compatibles.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 01:42:37 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 25, 2025, 01:19:05 pmTo mix metaphors, the whole scene was a pre-cambrian explosion of weird and wonderful life forms in a saturated solution. All it needed was one nucleation centre and everything crystallised around it; the IBM PC was the nucleation centre.The 8086 was expected to have a limited lifetime, being replaced real soon now by Intel's first 32 bit computer, the iAPX432. Wonder what happened to that?

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 02:26:47 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 01:42:37 pmMy understanding was that the IBM PC began as something of a throwaway project, not a serious attempt to set an industry standard, and the 8088/6 was chosen for convenience. Its success took them by surprise. MSDOS ended up as the OS through something of an accident. The ISA bus was reverse engineered and clones appeared. The ISA bus wasn't adequate for evolving demands and IBM came out with MCA, which was better protected in terms of IP rights, but other leading players came up with EISA and MCA died a death. IBM also came out with a successor OS, OS/2, but the momentum was with DOS/Windows, and later Windows 95/98 and then NT.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 02:38:23 pm
content: Quote from: iMo on April 25, 2025, 09:42:10 amIt seemed to be a law of nature that if you went to the trouble of numbering the cards, the elastic band holding them together would never break, but if you didn't number them, it would break and pick the most inconvenient time and place.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 02:55:12 pm
content: In the mainframe days of yore, “real programmers” remembered to populate the sequence number fields reserved at the far right of their Hollerith cards. A dropped deck could be resorted in the old-style IBM card sorting machines.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 03:03:50 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 25, 2025, 02:26:47 pmYup.The IBM PC became a standard for the same reasons as the UNIX/C: both were skunk works projects, there was no attempt at hiding the internals, and no serious attempt at enforcing IPR and/or exclusivity.The IBM PS2 and MCA violated the latter, and hence were ignored (along with OS/2). Intel's attempt to control the x86 evolution failed due to companies doing clean room implementations of the external ISA/behaviour. Can't remember whether that was also true with the BIOS.I remember in the mid 80s I had a listing of the IBM PC BIOS; it presumably came from IBM rather than being reverse engineered.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 03:35:23 pm
content: Quote from: SiliconWizard on April 25, 2025, 01:19:05 pmI mean the next generation of PCs which were *not* IBM PCs, except for the example I described which was not really intended as a PC but a business machine. All used the 68000, the Amiga and Atari ST being the prime examples. The UK had Acorn/ARM though, so there is one.QuoteThere was a thriving embedded market, as with the 8080 and then 8085, which is where the 80186 and 80188 went. This market would have been more important for Intel if the IBM PC had not used x86.Without the IBM PC, one of the business CP/M-86 machines like the Heathkit one I described would have taken its place. The market for these machines was killed by the existence of the IBM PC becoming the standard.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 03:39:52 pm
content: Quote from: IanB on April 22, 2025, 07:23:59 pmErr... Python with IDLE? It's pretty damn close and very similar to sitting in front of a C64 running a BASIC interpreter. I can do Hello World in one line. Get graphs plotted in about 10 lines. Implement simple functions in a few lines of code. And it's far more capable than any BASIC environment when it comes to teaching things that are important to modern programming, like lists/dictionaries, string manipulation, heck I can do HTTPS requests in two lines and parse 'actual data' from a server somewhere to do connected device things.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 03:42:38 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 03:03:50 pmSecond sourcing was a big thing back then. Customers were generally not prepared to buy a chip with only one manufacturer. It wasn't unknown for a fab to have a massive yield drop for no reason anyone could put their finger on and that to continue for months. Intel went along with that, as did other CPU designers. It was complicated with some companies having a right to manufacture and some a right to modify the design. AMD and IBM had the most permissive licences. I recall that when the 80486 appeared, Intel argued that AMD's licence didn't apply and there was a law suit. They were fed up with this second source business and were eyeing a juicy monopoly. AMD didn't produce 80486 processors for a few years, but ever faster 80386 designs. The same thing repeated with the Pentium. So it went on with various players appearing over the years, such as Nexgen, Cyrix and Winchip. I recall VIA bought someone's rights and produced low power Intel architecture CPUs for embedded applications.I'm sure I've seen a Youtube video about the whole convoluted story.Later on, Intel were trying to impose IA64, which was quite different and was protected as far as the eye could see with patents. AMD extended IA32 to AMD 64, which everyone wanted, and Intel was forced to licence it..

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 03:59:08 pm
content: My classes revolved around the the 8080 and 8085. By the time IBM came out with their 8088 based PC, I was ready to play with it. The fact we had lots of data books on how to design with it and write software for it was a plus. But, IMO that IBM opened up the entire PC hardware and BIOS with well written documentation, that cemented it. We used the PCs for everything from basic business stuff to running test fixtures on the shop floor with custom hardware we designed for them.We used Motorola for many of the products we designed. There was a lot of things I really liked about their architecture. Fellow engineers were always telling me to get an Apple. Problem was, it was locked. For me, that was a dead stop. Decades later, I was asked about doing a contract that involved an iPhone. Seemed like a fun little project. After filling out forms, getting approvals, ..... lots of wasted time, they finally let me into their inner sanctum.... of marketing BS. What, you want access to our development tools too?? Well, that even more time wasting .... I no bid, and said goodbye to Apple once and for all.***Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 03:03:50 pmStill have my technical reference manual:

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 04:06:34 pm
content: I had always though IBM opened the ISA hardware standard to support third-party card manufacturers. But I was a zealot for open architecture in those days and my memories may be colored by that.As far as which processor was what, I suspect there was not much grand strategy happening, and companies were making it up as they went, and selecting processors based on what would get them to market the quickest. The industry for home computers was exploding and everyone was a bit panicky, as I recall.IBM gave big-market legitimacy to the industry, and I suspect that's why it crystallized around them. Apple, Commodore, et al, were hobbyist toys. Serious business/industry/defense systems were made by IBM, Digital Research, Data General, Lanier, Perkin-Elmer (which became Concurrent), Control Data Corp, Amdahl, and the like. The Osborne and the Kaypro were the first to bridge the hobbyist gap into something that seemed serious and not a toy, despite that neither was really that much different than an Apple IIe in terms of broad capabilities. That they incorporated the terminal helped them--having to pay extra for a monitor was a real deterrent for the impecunious among us.In 1982, I walked into the credit union and asked to borrow money against the title of my car for a computer and a printer. The loan agent wanted to know what I was buying, because she did not believe it was possible to buy something serious for only $2000. I spent that money on the Kaypro II, which was better than the Osborne because it had a 9" screen, two floppy drives that were (gasp!)double-sided, a keyboard with real keys (unlike such toys as the Commodore Pet), and a metal case that looked like test equipment instead of a Samsonite suitcase. It also had 64K of RAM already installed, which in that market was an upgrade. And Kaypro was started by Non-Linear Systems, which had serious street cred in the geek community. With it, I bought an Okidata dot-matrix printer that was at least 12 bazillion times tougher and more reliable (and noisy) than the modern plastic fantastic Epson, and it still required perforated paper. The IBM PC was out by then, but the choice was not yet obvious. People asked why I didn't get an IBM PC, and my answer was simple: "$2000"Just half a dozen yeas later, I bought a PC clone, an NEC monitor, and an HP Laserjet with money promised from my software side hustle.Just two weeks ago, I went to Micro Center and bought their business-class hot-rod PC, with its liquid-cooled processor, 64G of RAM (just for starters), and a 1TB SSD. I already had a decent video card (as required by Adobe Photoshop--I'm no gamer) and a pair of Eizo 27" monitors, plus I threw in an 8TB hard disk. But if I'd had to buy everything afresh, the price would have been more like $6000--still a bit less in real dollars what that Kaypro cost.We can reminisce about the old days, and think back nostalgically at the dynamism in the industry back then. But I'm glad I don't have to go through it again.Rick "will load Linux on the old computer and put REW plus other stuff on it for the shop" Denney

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 04:16:26 pm
content: Back in the previous millennium, an episode of the cartoon series "King of the Hill" involved Y2K.Peggy Hill brought her Kaypro in for servicing, wondering if it were "Y2K compatible".The whippersnapper at the service depot said he doubted if it were "Y1K compatible".

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 04:32:46 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 25, 2025, 04:06:34 pmPrecisely. "Nobody was ever fired for buying IBM", and all that.QuoteYes and no.Yes: until the IBM PC arrived, everybody agonised over which computer and processor to use, and some even had two processors (z80 and 6800) to allay the fears. When the IBM PC materialised, the market crystallised into "corporate" and "home" machines.No: the PC market was kickstarted by a unique product that gave power back to its users: the VisiCalc spreadsheet on the Apple II. That wasn't "hobbyist" per se, but was certainly "early adopter".HP had remarkably good processors and computers around 1980, but marketed them to engineers as "calculators". Seeing "computer" on a purchase requisition tended to invoke the corporate immune response.QuoteFor a few years "the computer you wanted" always seemed to cost £/$1500QuoteIndeed. But it is gratifying to shock youngsters to see how little was needed to be productive.When I was young, "computer" was still a job title (as well as a machine). I still have my school slide rule, my scientific pocket calculator (everythingin 320 instructions!), and have recently got three 1000 inch slide rules and a mechanical calculator similar to the one at school. And then there are the weird things.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 04:38:53 pm
content: Quotewe had to use log books,no calculators allowed for us

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 04:52:02 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 03:03:50 pmCompaq did a clean room implementation of the BIOS, and that was that. Others did as well.Quote from: Zenith on April 25, 2025, 02:26:47 pmNothing needed to be reverse engineered. The ISA bus and IBM PC design came straight out of the application notes provided by Intel and others. The 8086/8088 was designed to use peripherals for the 8080, so the hardware design was the same. I know IBM provided the BIOS listings, and I think also the schematics.Quote from: rdenney on April 25, 2025, 04:06:34 pmThere were no formal requirements to build ISA hardware. You just had to know how and there were plenty of application notes from Intel and others.QuoteOsborne and Kaypro were not the first. Before them there was a thriving scene, including regular computer swap meets, built around various CP/M systems which had application compatibility. Intel even had their own development system which could run CP/M, but nobody used it for that because it was so expensive.We had an S-100 bus 63K (the ROM monitor overlaid 1K of the 64K address space leaving 63K available for RAM) business CP/M system used for development work that was literally made by "NNC" - No Name Computers. Obviously at that price it was a business computer and not a personal computer, but there was a used market by then.https://oldcomputers.net/NNC.htmlhttps://www.retrotechnology.com/herbs_stuff/s_nnc.html

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 05:05:14 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on April 25, 2025, 04:38:53 pmCertainly 4fig tables and definitely no calculators in exams, but the Sinclair Scientific became affordable.The first time calculators were allowed in exams was during my first year at university. Amusingly some people didn't recognise the one case where a calculator was necessary: to calculate the voltages on an opamps output and two inputs. still have some, but the logs only occupy two pages, and I remember Godfrey and Siddons' tables being longer.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 05:06:32 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 04:32:46 pmThe Apple ][ with some variation of a Z80 expansion card was popular for CP/M compatibility.QuoteI think the CP/M equivalent was a spreadsheet called Multiplan, later purchased by Microsoft? I only encountered it later on Apple ][ CP/M systems.QuoteI managed to miss slide rules. I had a TI-55-II but upgraded to the TI-66 programmable calculator which I still have. I was the first one in my area to get a Casio fx-7000G. Then I went RPN with an HP48g and never looked back. I currently use an HP50g.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 05:17:43 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 04:32:46 pmManagement forced engineering to use those crap tools. I would create the schedules on paper. Once complete, enter them into VisiSchedule, one line at a time, saving after each line. Otherwise, there was a good chance I would loose all my work.Quote from: David Hess on April 25, 2025, 04:52:02 pmYes, the schematics were included. Not only for the MB but for the other boards as well. I had to make a test fixture that drove a custom display once and used the IBM card to do it. Because they provided the schematics, it was fairly straight forward to modify their hardware to do what I needed.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 05:18:52 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 25, 2025, 05:06:32 pmSlide rules were remarkably ergonomic and much faster than mechanical calculators.Slide rules beneficially forced you to beinstinctivelyaware of the concept of "significant figures". No escaping it!

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 05:25:00 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 05:18:52 pm"Slide-rule accuracy" is a useful concept which we have lost.Most calculations of resistor values for real circuits only require that resolution.Unfortunately, presbyopia keeps me away from my slide rules.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 05:30:53 pm
content: Quote from: TimFox on April 25, 2025, 05:25:00 pmJust so.I have 4 pairs of prescription specs (driving, TV, monitor, reading distances), plus a head-mounted magnifying visor with multiple lenses. Each of those cost <£20Deafness is my problem. With my good ear I can hear an HP audio oscillator for ~0.25s, before my hearing aid interprets it as howlback and suppresses it.

author: mawyatt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 05:38:17 pm
content: Scientific Calculators weren't available when we were an undergrad, slide rules were and CRC Tables what we used. Recall in grad school when a friend showed up with the new HP35, blew everyone away including the Professors!!When the Apple II was introduced we developed a DSO and SA for it. Recall having to write some of the machine level code in time sequence accessing the ADC and Apple memory, and the rest was written in Complied BASIC. The overall size was too big so we had the swap with the Floppy Drive when engaging the SA and DSO back and forth!! All this convinced us that we didn't want to become a Programmer!!We also developed a AWG using the Apple II which had a massive array of ECL Memory and a pair of Hybrid 16 Bit ECL DACs which were "Ping Ponged" to get the desired speed for some custom in-house test equipment.Later we developed a numerical solution approach for computing Inverse and back again Laplace Transforms (vaguely recall it was based upon the Central Limit Theorem), this was developed for the new IBM PC as a consultant and the software was sold to another company.Anyway, fun times back then!!Best

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 06:06:17 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 05:18:52 pmI learned to use slide rules later, and have a few, but the only place where I liked them was quantitative analysis and stoichiometry where the slide rule displays all of the possible ratios at once.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 06:07:23 pm
content: When the HP35 arrived during my grad school days, it was way too expensive for me.I compromised with a TI "Electronic Slide Rule" SR-10 (about 1/4 the price, if I remember correctly).It featured scientific notation (with exponent), reciprocal (1/x), square (x2), and square root functions.Before that, I made use of the CRC ("rubber bible") 5-digit log and log-trig tables when I needed more than slide-rule accuracy.The SR-10 was the last calculator I bought with "algebraic notation"; after using a reasonably-priced HP25 I realized the superiority of RPN.While still an undergraduate, I took a logic course that used "forward Polish notation" instead of "Russell-Whitehead" notation for predicate calculus (symbolic logic).(Łukasiewicz is hard to pronounce backwards.)

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 06:34:38 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 25, 2025, 02:38:23 pmExactly, no line numbers in Algol and Fortran on the cards at that time..Therefore the vivid remembrance..

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:26:53 pm
content: Quote from: mawyatt on April 25, 2025, 05:38:17 pmYes, they were like that. I first saw and used one at university. It was in the library, on the librarians' desk, securely locked to the desk. I've now bought one, just because. Clearly it was someone prize possession, since it came in a beautifully made mahogany box.Some people used a "word processor" to write their final year project report, on using the tax editor on a PDP11 at 5am. I preferred handwritten text, with paragraphs cut and pasted onto fanfold paper.I wonder if youngsters realise cut and paste wasn't a metaphor. (Apparently some are amazed to find hardware that looks like the "save file" ideogram in word processors)QuoteSwapping floppies persisted until the Apple Mac. I have one, and it runs Smalltalkglaciallyslowly, but it was enough to convince me (in 1986) that OOP was going to be important. And, 2 years later, that C++ was simply wrongheaded.As for development, the worst I heard of was a client insisting their application was compiled on TI9900 based system - which didn't have batch files, so each command line had to be retyped every time.QuoteThey are, when you are doing something new and interesting. But I'm glad some pain points are mere history.

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:27:08 pm
content: While OT, my first slide rule was a Pickett that somehow appeared in my hospital room (HS athletic injury) shared with a Pickett employee in 1959. In college and later this K&E sufficed. I still have it (the photo is relatively recent).As for data centers of that era, the first paper I published with a mass spectrum required a whole stack of keypunch cards delivered to the uni computer one night, and then converted by a manual process Xerox. That was amazing to watch.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:28:58 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 25, 2025, 06:06:17 pmParallel processing on a slide rule! That's worth rememberingOr is it quantum processing where all results are available simultaneously , waiting for one to be "selected"?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:36:45 pm
content: Quote from: TimFox on April 25, 2025, 06:07:23 pmI never liked non-RPN calculators. I like the mentality of first gathering every thing necessary, and only then starting the calculation. Plus being able to check what you are going to do before doing it.Never liked half-RPN calculators, where tan(40+5) was entered as 40+5=tan. Nor, of course, 1+2*3=9Nowadays for simple calculations I use RPN calculator apps, or HP32s 50th anniversary edition, or a spreadsheet.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:42:13 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 03:03:50 pmMeta-question: what are "skunk works" projects? Is that a Briticism?Never hoid that term before.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:48:26 pm
content: Quote from: westfw on April 25, 2025, 06:39:10 amI still have two HP 150s and you're right they weren't compatible with the PC but they were "MS_DOS compatible". Meaning that functions that relied purely on the standard MS_DOS calls were supposed to work but software that made non-standard calls or that read and wrote directly to hardware would not work. The Sanyo MBC-550 was the same way. The very early versions of Lotus 123 would work on my Sanyo but the later versions won't so I ditched the Sanyo and bought a IBM-PC clone.According to the HP engineers that I've talked to the 150 was intended to be a CPM computer similar to the HP 120 and 125 but when HP realized that the IBM-PC was fast becoming The Standard, they quickly adopted it to run MS-DOS (not PC-DOS!).AT&T sold a very good competitor (the 6300) of the IBM PC but IIRC it used an 8086 CPU and they were about 30% faster than a PC. My NEC MultiSpeed laptop (1986 IIRC) came with an NEC V-30 CPU which if memory serves was an improved version of the Intel 8086. I really loved the MultiSpeed and I did a hell of a lot of work on it and I still have it out in the spare bed room. I never had the heart to throw it out.

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 07:56:15 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on April 25, 2025, 04:38:53 pmSigh. That brings back unpleasant memories.I learned using a slide rule (a Keuffel & Esser Deci-Trig Log-Log), though I doubt I could do more than multiply and divide on it any more.While in college, I worked as a drafter in an engineering firm, and had to set aside my calculator. The boss required us to use Smoley's Four Combined Tables because he didn't trust trig calculations that he didn't understand. That was a sore trial, but, as with the slide rule, it teaches one about significant figures and the difference between accuracy and precision.And my standard desk calculator is still the HP11C that I bought in maybe 1984. Long live RPN! But the calculator I used in college, and wrote software for as part of my student-work research gig, was a TI-59. The 11C still works; the 59's buttons stopped being reliable even before the rechargeable NiCad batteries started dying. I think I still have the printer cradle for that thing somewhere, and maybe even a notebook of magnetic cards.The first serious portable computer I worked with was an Epson HX20, complete with cassette memory storage. We used it for data acquisition from an instrumented vehicle. 15 minutes earlier, or so it seems, we were bragging about the five figures we'd spent on a Radian-branded minicomputer (maybe made by Data General) that we mounted in a car to doexactly the same data acquisition.A decade after that, I wrote software to run on a laptop computer to collect exactly the same data from an instrumented vehicle as a side hustle. It's still on the market, though I sold my interest in it 30 years ago. Now, it uses GPS and doesn't need the vehicle instrumentation at all. Times change.Rick "the sun always shines on Memory Lane" Denney

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:01:34 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 25, 2025, 07:42:13 pmCome on AK. It was an American term that initially described the team that created the P-51 (and others) at Lockheed.Quote from: Google AI

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:05:16 pm
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 25, 2025, 08:01:34 pmWell, gosharino, I had plumb forgot about those prerequisites for posting here, that one be totally conversant in aviation, submarining, space exploration and tunnel-boring-machine technology.Silly me.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:05:24 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 25, 2025, 04:32:46 pmHP marketed their machines as calculators for two reasons. One; they also sold large rack mount computers like the HP 1000 and the 2100 and didn't want to compete with those and second; they wanted to get around the export restrictions on "computers" so that they could sell them in countries like the USSR. I'm very serious, a friend of mine went to the USSR in the early 1980s to set one up (a HP 9825 IIRC) that was used to control an entire steel mill.

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:24:41 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 25, 2025, 08:05:16 pmIt's as American as apple pie. Jack Northrop did as much to keep you free as any soldier on the ground did (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Northrop) .

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:39:30 pm
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 25, 2025, 08:24:41 pmAh, you still believe that "we're free because of our military" crap? Or are you being ironic?My idea for a monument to the military--and I'm dead serious here--is a gigantic replica of a toilet, maybe 50 times life size, in a park, with a ring of bucket loaders around it, each scooping up enormous piles of dollar bills and placing them into the toilet bowl.Could use play money, but real money would be even better.

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:47:12 pm
content: Well, that sunshine on Memory Lane just had a dark cloud float in.Rick "sigh" Denney

author: jpanhalt
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 08:47:40 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 25, 2025, 08:39:30 pmBS You clearly don't know or appreciate how close we came to losing that war. It's not worth continuing this conversation more.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:11:15 pm
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 25, 2025, 08:47:40 pmActually, I do. Re-readThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reichnot long ago.Hint: today's wars bear no relation to WWII.BTW, the ones who won WWII for us (at least in Europe) were the Soviets. Bill Shirer's essential history of the Nazis, which does show how close the whole thing was.He was there in the Reichstag listening to Der Fuhrer's speeches.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:24:58 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 25, 2025, 04:06:34 pmYou may well be right. I'll have to look it up. IIRC Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS and the clones started. The big test as to whether it was truly IBM compatible was whether it could run MS Flight Simulator with no problems.Quote from: rdenney on April 25, 2025, 04:06:34 pmIt took over from hobby electronics which was a business from the early 60s through to about the mid 90s, where folks could make things that were fairly useful or intriguing, such as bat detectors and rhythmn generators. The impulse still continues around "making" and the Raspberry Pi sells well, as do Arduinos etc.Quote from: rdenney on April 25, 2025, 04:06:34 pmAmstrad in the UK was the shrewdest approach. It was a Z80 based machine with a printer, a monitor and a very good word processor. There were also games and there were home accounts programs (?) and there were probably language compilers for those interested. Sugar sold a superior replacement for a typewriter. £300 and it worked.Quote from: rdenney on April 25, 2025, 04:06:34 pmThat was then, this is now, 40 years later. The web and incredible bandwidth connections and what would have been seen then as nearly infinite processing power, have made a difference.

author: Wallace Gasiewicz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:25:31 pm
content: Anyway, it should really be SKONK WORKS. Adapted from a comic strip, Lil' Abner. But it is Skunk works

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:31:52 pm
content: Quoteand a 3,not 31/2,inch disc drive

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:33:26 pm
content: Quote from: Wallace Gasiewicz on April 25, 2025, 09:25:31 pmThe "skonk works" was a literal factory (making Kickapoo Joy Juice from skunks) in Li'l Abner, giving yet another reason to "stay away from moonshine hooch, when you're on a spree".The "skunk works" is a secretish lab at Lockheed that developed advanced stuff, and Lockheed Martin still uses the name.Lockheed may have started using the term in 1939 or 1943, but Capp's version is older. Apparently, they used the proper spelling of "skunk" to avoid copyright hassles.The term "skunk works' is in very popular technical usage, and can be found easily on Google.In another thread, someone used the classic term "defenestration" appropriately: again, the word can be found in any English dictionary or by search engine.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:37:59 pm
content: Quote from: TimFox on April 25, 2025, 09:33:26 pmLike the (now gone) Defenestration Building in San Francisco:

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:43:09 pm
content: Looks like a Bohemian neighborhood...

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 09:54:20 pm
content: Quote from: jpanhalt on April 25, 2025, 08:01:34 pmCome on AK. It was an American term that initially described the team that created the P-51 (and others) at Lockheed.Quote from: Google AIYou mean the SR-71! And the Skunk Works was the name of the facility where it was built and not the team. The P-51 was designed and built by North American Aviation, the same people that built the Apollo spacecraft. Kelly Johnson designed both the P-38 fighter and the SR-71 and you can see the similarities.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 10:01:40 pm
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 25, 2025, 09:54:20 pmThe P-38 (originally YP-38) was developed by Lockheed. The first site of the "Skunk Works" was in a former distillery, which probably prompted the allusion to Al Capp.The U-2 and SR-71 are later products before the merger into Lockheed-Martin.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 10:02:41 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 25, 2025, 09:24:58 pmBut didn't that Amstrad use a 3" floppy disk? My first 386 SX computer was an Amstrad. It was a pretty good machine for the price. I think it cost me $350 from BSR the mail order company.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 25, 2025, 10:40:13 pm
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 25, 2025, 10:02:41 pmI think so. The FD was a strange elongated thing as I recall. They sold that Z80 based machine, which was mainly bought as a better typewriter, and later they produced IBM clone PCs which were very popular for a while.I was working on minicomputers at the time, so while all this was vaguely interesting and I had friends who had these things, when I got home from work I found I had other things to do.

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 02:28:24 am
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 25, 2025, 08:05:16 pmFor your penance, you are now required to read "Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed" by Ben Rich. And as an optional followup "Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake" by Ron Westrum. Both damn good reads, I initially read library copies and then went out and bought my own because they're worth re-reading.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 02:47:30 am
content: Quote from: 5U4GB on April 26, 2025, 02:28:24 amIf you read historical or technical books, make sure you can access a dictionary or reference website when unfamiliar words, events, or places appear.

author: Psi
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 03:00:36 am
content: If you want to mess around in pascal just for the lolz, Lazarus is basically free open-source Delphi.Works in windows or linux last time i installed it.https://www.lazarus-ide.org/

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 05:47:54 am
content: QuoteIBM had an interesting philosophy (presumably copied from the mainframe industry) where everything was publicly documented (eg the BIOS listing) but still protected as intellectual property (by copyright/etc.)So if you had ever looked at their BIOS, and decided to write your own, you were "contaminated" - subject to claims that you violated the copyright... (at least, this was what worried the clone manufacturers. IBM had a lot of legal muscle.)This sort of thing is one of the reasons for some of the details in "Open Source" software licenses that started to show up in a similar timeframe.(With some back-blow. I know, for instance, that the people at Intel who work on the Intel C compiler are carefully insulated and not permitted to ever look at gcc code...)

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 06:15:49 am
content: I sold commercial software I developed in BASIC (QuickBASIC 4.5 and BASIC PDS 7.1)

author: EEVblog
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 06:33:35 am
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 22, 2025, 08:09:10 pmReminds me of a university digital electronics lab I did where they got us to build some complex thing on the breadboard using 7400 series logic, also I think it was mostly all NAND gates.I took one look at the schematic and went and told the lecturer this wasn't going to work, he told me to shut up and go and build it.So I built it and mine was the only one in the class that worked.Everyone came over to look and I had to explain what fanout was and why it mattered, and how to get around it.The lecturer said that was bullshit and that the chips were faulty and I got lucky, so he passed everyone

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 06:59:53 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 26, 2025, 06:15:49 amFirst written in Amiga basic, then ported to the PC, in the really early 90s, I wrote a Gerber translation tool which took older separate aperture style gerber files, merged them into the newer embedded style gerber files and shifted/translated codes around a reserve table, checked for out of bounds objects and offered a simple step and repeat. I should have sold it instead of giving it to my friends at my fab house. I later found out it was being used by a few local PCB manufacturers.These were the days when such nifty utilities could be a little gold mine.

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 07:28:35 am
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 26, 2025, 06:33:35 amI had something similar where we had to build some very basic circuits using 7400-series TTL and report the results. While at school I'd designed and built a 68000-based SBC with dual-ported DRAM to allow an NS455 TMP to run the display and a bunch of other stuff  and didn't want to spend ages faffing around with NAND gates and the like, so I did the entire assignment as a gedanken experiment... and mislabelled one input in the writeup which meant the results weren't valid unless you realised one signal was reversed or swapped or something. The lecturer made me redo the whole thing, which however was just a second gedanken experiment with the input now correctly labelled.Not turning up for any of his lectures probably didn't help my case. I then sold off all the RAM on it during the DRAM drought which made me more than the cost of the rest of the hardware. I figured I'd re-buy it when prices were back to normal, and it's sat in a drawer ever since.

author: dave j
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:08:59 am
content: Quote from: Stray Electron on April 25, 2025, 10:02:41 pmInterview with the designer of the Amstrad computers.An explanation of why they used the 3" drive is at about 14:00.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:33:23 am
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 22, 2025, 08:09:10 pmYes, 1960s 7400 logic was glacially slow - and that meant you could get away with an awful lot.By the 70s it was becoming a little more difficult; I remember being told that the PCB people were surprised my first large LSTTL (double-sided PTH) board worked first time - because most boards didn't.In the 80s some FTTL devices were problematic even on well-designed PCBs; ground bounce in octal tri-state transceivers where Vcc/Gnd were on opposite corners. See H&H's comments below on the 1985 74AC series.As for modern (i.e. less than 40 years old) logic families on solderless breadboards - good luck with that.As Horowitz and Hill put it in TAoE3 p857, p809...Because of these noise problems, it is generally best not to use a faster logic family than you need. That’s whywe use 74HC(T) logic, rather than 74AC(T), for general-purpose use in our electronics course (where students puttheir circuits togetherusing “solderless breadboards”).This is a 10 MHz clock signal at the output of a 74AC14 inverter, wired up on a “solderless prototyping” board(a dubious practice; but, hey, it works, most of the time anyway).We took the precaution of using an IC socket with integral SMT bypass capacitor,to put the best face on it.I didn't realise you could still get such sockets.There were also Rogers Micro-Q decoupling capacitors. People might like to consider why those were needed, invented and used, and why the physical construction is good for the purpose.

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:47:49 am
content: The C64 was norious for lots of noise and fast spikes on the signals. They already back than had the advice of not using extra fast logic (e.g. 74ALS...) for extensions. The old 7400 logic was not that slow, but rather power hungry. The really slow logic is the CD4000 series, especially when used with 5 V or even less.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:53:54 am
content: Quote from: Kleinstein on April 26, 2025, 08:47:49 am4000 series CMOS had the advantage of noise immunity, especially when used with 15V supplies.The only time I've used 4000 series was to make a bandpass filter with a Q of 4000 using 10% capacitors. The 15V increased the dynamic range, which was limited by transmission gate imperfections I wasn't able to avoid. Modern transmission gates aremuchsuperior!

author: guenthert
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 09:24:45 am
content: Quote from: dave j on April 26, 2025, 08:08:59 amAnd he isn't entirely honest about it, claiming that the 3.5" drive didn't exist then and only came to IBM PC four years later. Well, yes, PCs had them late, but Atari shipped the ST in summer of 85 with the 3.5" drive (Apple shipped the Mac in spring '84 also with such a drive, but then it might have been expensive). Sony introduced the drive already in 1980, so yeah, it did exist. A bit silly then that he argues that people misremember and don't get the timeline right.It might be a bit of a sour point, as they deservedly received a lot of critique for that move. The drives were alright, but the 3" disks were a niche market andmuchmore expensive than the 3.5" ones.

author: mikerj
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 12:06:33 pm
content: Quote from: floobydust on April 22, 2025, 07:19:57 pmI completely disagree, it's an amazing language that is still massively popular 50 years after Dennis Ritchie conceived it. I will agree that it takes some time to become proficient and learn it's dangers, but that because it was never intended as a hand holding HLL for for the inexperienced. It's not a good fit for all applications, but for embedded development on microcontrollers it's hard to beat.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 01:27:22 pm
content: Quote from: EEVblog on April 26, 2025, 06:33:35 amWe were given a set of requirements and had to design a circuit to accomplish it. We were provided with a book that contained all of the labs at the start of the class, so you had plenty of time to get a head start. I would take advantage of that and have the labs fully operational ahead of time. One of our projects was a 7-segment LED controller (out of NAND gates of course). When the teacher goes over the assignment, he makes a change to the requirements. I show up to the lab with my breadboard and went through all the combinations. Everything was fine of course. Then came the question, What is that relay doing in your circuit?I got away with it.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 01:35:44 pm
content: After all this, I finally remembered...I actually taught BASIC at summer camp during 1984,85,86.I began with Atari Basic, then Apple II basic.I was really popular as I was the only camper acting as a counselor part of the day and I was teaching the campers on new way to use their minds, how to think things through to engineer their own creations.Also, at the time, doing some custom lighting for the West Side Story play, manipulating a broken radio's local oscillator into an FM radio station and doing repairs on many of the ghetto blasters and walkmans of the time really made me known camp wide as someone who could take over or blow up the camp if I wanted to...

author: Siwastaja
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 06:55:25 pm
content: Quote from: mikerj on April 26, 2025, 12:06:33 pmHistory has also shown that beginners are happy to choose C (or even C++),despitetheoreticians nagging about C being bad for beginners. But beginners do not care. Beginners do not expect training wheels for everything. Beginners do not care about making mistakes and shooting themselves in the foot. They are full of energy and eager to try, fail and learn, and work with real-world tools with real-world limitations in them.People also choose other cars than Toyota, even including cars that are dangerous to drive or break down all the time, and even as their first cars.Stuff like C preprocessor and #define macros are off-putting to academics and purists, but tobeginnersthey make perfect sense: fancy automated text replacement seems like an obvious introduction togeneric programmingandmetaprogrammingwith much less learning curve than trying to immediately grasp what object orientation, inheritance, schemas or templates are and how they are used. Later they can see if they need a more sophisticated tool.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 07:08:17 pm
content: Quote from: Siwastaja on April 26, 2025, 06:55:25 pmBeginners often realise their incompetence. Having gained a few small "wins", they feel more competent than they actually are. Unfortunately that is also true for more experience and competent people. That is why, only 20 years ago, Hans Boehm had to "remind"veryexperienced people that you couldn't write thread in C unless you made some assumptions that C explicitly avoided giving. Yup, the very experienced people weren't as knowledgeable as they presumed!https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1065010.1065042Then there's the C++ committee who refused to believe their creation was Turing complete, until Erwin Unruh rubbed their noses in it.http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C%2B%2B_Programming/Templates/Template_Meta-Programming#History_of_TMPSummary:experiencedC and C++ programmersroutinelyoverestimate their knowledge of the language. There are too many pitfalls.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 07:16:54 pm
content: I often wonder what would happen if someone built a better breadboard that had some kind of ground plane functionality, perhaps to stake a row to a ground plane underneath a chip with a extra long pin or something like that.The bad reputation of bread boards IMO comes with high speed circuits that have too big dimensionsImagine the entire breadboard had another bread board under neath it, so if you have a ground pin, you take a longer pin and put it through both breadboards to link that row to a ground plane. I wonder how many problems it would get rid of. Each row would have a larger diameter hole that you use say a pin to link it into the ground on the bottom (which would be a copper plate with a giant grid of circular pin PCB mount receptacles (4 leaf)Theoretically you could do power planes this way too. The leads would be a little long but it should still work alot better as a real plane.Like this. And give the students calipers to see if their leads are in spec for the board before they install them (along with some jigs to determine if parts leads are correct length). Requires students that think they need to take some care with their 100k / year education (not to be treated like criminals in the lab). I always laughed at it when the school says its ivy league level with the best of the best and the banana cables are locked up and guarded like the dynamite shed in a prison work site.

author: TimFox
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 07:28:30 pm
content: For low-quantity digital stuff, we used to buy Eurocard-sized boards from Vero that had "colander" planes on both sides of the board, for power and ground.We could wire-wrap or solder wires, depending on the type.A recent search of the Vero website shows nothing with colander planes on two sides: maybe I missed something.

author: coppercone2
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 07:31:53 pm
content: Imagine TA's that actually bought modern SMT chips (unavoidable), tested the circuits to see if they work in the advanced breadboards or solder boards in adapters and had you actually prototype circuits and even showed you what happens when you put it into a engineered PCB vs the board with some sample measurements of interest

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 07:38:56 pm
content: BASIC (Beginners All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) was designed as a beginners interpreted language to be used with teletype machines. It was fairly easy to write an interpreter which didn't need much memory, which fitted in well with the limited resources of 8 bit home computers from the early 80s. Feedback on errors came back straight away. There was no need for compilation listings with errors and warnings, then invoking the linker. It wasn't that sort of world. Floppy disks were at the luxury end of the market and HDDs completely beyond reach. As I recall audio cassettes were used to store programs. It became a standard. It was a lot easier than messing with assembler.Some of the code was unbelievably messy, with no line breaks and peek and poke all over the place. The only control structure was GO TO. It was a thing of its time. Later on there were variations intended for business and compiled BASIC.FORTH is an interpreted language and a FORTH system would also fit the memory requirements. It was a lot faster. I don't think it was as intuitive. The only 8 bit home computer I recall that used it was the Jupiter Ace. It enjoyed some success, but never really caught on. I believe it was used for some embedded applications, but the development systems for them would have been totally beyond question in terms of cost, space and effort to learn for most buyers of 8 bit home computers.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:12:26 pm
content: Quote from: mikerj on April 26, 2025, 12:06:33 pmLook; to stay laser-focused on-topic here, which is really why BASIC came with nearly all early home computers, let's not get bogged down in one of those stupid "yeah, well, my language (C) is better than yours! nyah nyah nyah" arguments.Let's concede, for the sake of argument, that yes, Ccouldbe better than BASIC for lots of reasons, primarily in the realm of production coding.But for beginners, those sitting down in front of a computah for the first time, would C be an appropriate language to learn on?Hell, no.BASIC beats it in that realm hands down.For learning. Not necessarily for creating production programs.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:25:27 pm
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on April 26, 2025, 07:16:54 pmThere are such commercial devices which do almost all that, and also reduce the uncertainties associated with variable contact resistance. There are several examples towards the bottom ofthis page.Those products also have other benefits, and if the leads are short then their inductance is also reduced.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:26:41 pm
content: QuoteTotally disagree,an i started with basic.If you know nothing you dont have to forget anything ,just like the language we talk with,the first language we learn is easy and comes naturally we then decide or get forced to learning a second and for many its a struggle.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:27:06 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 26, 2025, 07:38:56 pmFOR, NEXT? IF, THEN, ELSE? ON?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:32:29 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on April 26, 2025, 08:26:41 pmJust so.My first language was Algol-60, and us schoolkids just got on and used it. However editing on 5 channel 5cps teletypes meant we weren't fussy about indentation, to our teacher's irritation.Later, the more.formal definitions in Algol68 caused me some difficulty, e.g what 's meant by int, ref int, ref ref int, etc.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:34:21 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 26, 2025, 08:27:06 pmNever forget ON ERROR GOTO. No, things weren't better in the old days!

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:43:54 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on April 26, 2025, 08:26:41 pmNot a very convincing argument to me. I also started with BASIC, moved the next semester to COBOL (and two other languages that are as dissimilar you'd be hard pressed to find); then moved over to the engineering school where I learnt FORTRAN, then back to business where I taught myself 8088 assembly language. (Later on I learned C for a job I had.)No conflict betwixt those languages whatsoever. Meaning I didn't have to disremember or throw anything out from one language to learn the next one.I actually worked for a while (for the school) as a paid COBOL programmer. And you know what? I liked it. I worked for another programmer in the payroll dep't. (which of course is one oftheclassic applications for that language), and everything made sense to me.I'd like to see one of these snarky snot-nosed youngsters write a robust, reliable and maintainable payroll program in Python or FORTH or whatever ...

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:57:29 pm
content: I'd say the latter day rough equivalent of BASIC on 80s home computers is Python on a Raspberry Pi. The Raspberry Pi is from 30 odd years later and from the standards of the early 80s, it has limitless processing power, RAM and unbelievably spacious and reliable storage. It also has a fully fledged operating system. It appeals to the same tinkering mindset. I've not heard of people using BASIC on a Raspberry Pi. I'm sure some do.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 08:58:24 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 26, 2025, 08:43:54 pmEngineering is knowing the characteristics of various tools, sand selecting the right tool for the job. Different jobs => different tools.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 09:03:03 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 26, 2025, 08:57:29 pm30 years ago one of my bosses, David Dack, lamented that something had been lost with the disappearance of electronics hams/hackers/etc. I agreed, but noted the same mentality was alive and well with computers.RPi and Arduino have brought that mentality back to embedded systems.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 09:08:17 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 26, 2025, 08:43:54 pmIt was a domain specific language for commercial applications, with cheque protect characters, fixed point arithmetic, the ability to do arithmetic on characters and so on. It wasn't a general purpose language and it didn't handle floating point.I programmed in it for a few years and it kept me fed. It always seemed somewhat looked down on by the wider computing world.Another one was RPG, Report Program Generator. Some people raved over it, and it was used in a lot of banking applications.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 09:17:09 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 26, 2025, 09:08:17 pmThe "shop" I worked for, the UCC, university computer center, used RPG extensively as well as COBOL. (I never used it myself.)Just like SPSS for the social scientists.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 09:25:18 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 26, 2025, 09:08:17 pmThere was a book at school with an intro to the principal languages: Algol, Fortran, COBOL, BASIC, maybe more.I looked at COBOL, and when it got to the "advanced" statement A=B+C*D (rather than ADD A TO B GIVING C), I thought eff that for a language.Never got into Rexx (developed by a floating point luminary, Mike Cowlishaw), which wackypedia reckons is a precursor to Tcl and Python. Only wrote one hello world program in Fortran, and never had to do serious number crunching.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 10:03:34 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 26, 2025, 09:25:18 pmWhy? Seems like a rather offhand reason to banish a programming language.COBOL is a narrative language--on purpose. It actually does make it much easier to maintain, less cryptic for the poor slob who has to fix or add something to someone else's code.It certainly ain't the tool of choice to write, say, a FFT or calculate a rocket trajectory.COBOL is the Rodney Dangerfield of programming languages.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 10:29:03 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 26, 2025, 10:03:34 pmI was 17. It was the early 70s. "Goto considered harmful" was a contentious concept. Flip flop metastability had not yet been described, let alone believed, nor ameliorated.Everything has changed since - including the languages.The book showed Fortran using computed goto statements likeCode:...GO TO ( 10, 20, 30, 40 ), N...10 CONTINUE...20 CONTINUE...40 CONTINUEAlgol60 waswonderful, delightfulby comparison.Why subject myself to unnecessary pain?

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 10:36:51 pm
content: OK, I get it: you were a new car buyer, shopping in the showroom for the perfect ride. And indeed, why cheat yourself?My approach to programming was different: not claiming better or worse, just differentI was enrolled in the College of Business's data processing program (soon to be promoted to "computer information systems"). COBOL was the tool I was given; I had no choice.I learned it because I wanted to graduate and get a good-paying job.At first it seemed a bit strange; all that verbosity, the column-specific formatting (a holdover from the good old punch-card days), all those sections and divisions. But once learned, it wasn't an excessive amount of stuff to remember. And it got the job done.I probably won't ever write another line of COBOL in my life. But it was a very good tool for the job at the time.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 26, 2025, 11:24:56 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 26, 2025, 08:34:21 pmYou are all missing the more important GOSUB and RETURN.Also, some of the later variants of basic also had WHILE and WEND.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 05:44:14 am
content: There wasn't just one version of BASIC and some BASICs were more basic than others.

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 27, 2025, 06:24:00 am
content: The original 8080 MS Basic source listings, people say..96MB large pdf, printed out on Aug 27th 1975 and Sept 10th 1975 (Gates/Allen/Davidoff)https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&redir_token=QUFFLUhqbXM5dFFrOGJ2b0U1WWN1aWlvOFBQOE9pYVVsUXxBQ3Jtc0tsNXc2Sm5ZNUpqRVNjajBjTm9rcUJpTEJhU3lBYWZLRzdkMk5zRUNmWHd0ZGhzVWpmY1RxZDJVZ2pUN3ZLem1oT3NEZGExaDRvcXFMRXV0cHNwbkNOQzhCZm9vWTRQSXliVm5MaDJuSHhHNG1SY0RiMA&q=https%3A%2F%2Fimages.gatesnotes.com%2F12514eb8-7b51-008e-41a9-512542cf683b%2F34d561c8-cf5c-4e69-af47-3782ea11482e%2FOriginal-Microsoft-Source-Code.pdf&v=la_wnT2AOu8

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 06:08:05 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 26, 2025, 09:03:03 pmAnd the ham community is all about data transmission these days, or so it seems rom the local clubs.BASIC was a programming facility aimed at a person sitting at a terminal and interacting with the computer. Providing ways to interact with computers as they first appeared in homes was important--nobody really understood their use cases for buying them. But the idea was that a computer hobbyist would while away the hours sitting at the computer.The embedded systems crowd was into creating systems that would stand alone and do interesting things. It wasn't about direct user interaction, but rather about machine autonomy. That's the crowd that has been attracted to the Raspberry-Pi, it seems to me. I don't really know anyone who bought an RPi to sit at and operate like an interactive terminal just for the fun of sitting at a terminal. So, they are programmed to look like hardware-based systems of yore, or new use cases that would have used hardware-based systems if invented decades back. That philosophy seems to me inconsistent with interpreter-style programming, irrespective of the language used.But even back in the day, top-down structured programming was a bit antithetical to the BASIC concept of entering one line at a time. The Pascal approach to every high-level process being:BeginDo_Something;End.(I've already forgotten the syntax...sigh). It's hard to work from the abstract to the specific in quite the same way using interpreted BASIC.Rick "used to know stuff" Denney

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 08:17:28 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 28, 2025, 06:08:05 pmI dunno; my prejudicial opinion is that Pascal is an anal-retentive language whose main purpose is to rigidly enforce academic notions of "structured programming". The farthest thing from providing a novice a pleasant first interactive experience with a computah.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 08:59:11 pm
content: Quote from: coppercone2 on April 26, 2025, 07:16:54 pmThat's an interesting idea but I can see all sorts of mechanical problems with it. Still, maybe there are companies that offer other patterns beyond what we have used since their conception. Then again, it's never really been much of a problem for me to wire them up.As for their bad reputation. I wonder how much of that comes from poor quality products.When we had that breadboard oscillator contest, I was asking about modifying the board to add a plane to try and tame it. It was ruled out as the breadboard had to remain stock.

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 09:12:18 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 26, 2025, 08:43:54 pmI was using it to code some automated test equipment. Outside of it being RPN and . popped the stack, I don't remember too much about it. Maybe there were newer versions with more power than what I had used. The one I used supported Turtle graphics.https://archive.org/details/mmsforth-general-description-1980I think the earliest BASIC that I had to use professionally was on a Fairchild FF-303 in-circuit test system. That used a Data General NOVA computer with a 14" removable platter. My guess is they chose BASIC for the ease of use.

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 10:16:46 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 28, 2025, 08:17:28 pmWirth produced it as a teaching device and was surprised when compilers were produced for it. He then set to work to produce Modula 2 and a compiler for it. It was even more anally retentive. I wrote Pascal for 18 months. I never liked it and couldn't see what all the fuss was about.

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 11:29:37 pm
content: People should be a little careful when "fondly" remembering BASIC. If you're talking about after "all computers have at least 48k of RAM and one floppy drive", your experience was likely a lot different (and more pleasant) than earlier computers.Here's the manual for the early 4k and 8k Altair (Microsoft) BASIC:https://altairclone.com/downloads/manuals/BASIC%20Manual%2075.pdfNo "ELSE." "ON", "poke", "out", Strings, bitwise math: only in the 8k version...

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 28, 2025, 11:41:04 pm
content: Quote from: westfw on April 28, 2025, 11:29:37 pmHmmm, I thought Atari Basic was 4kb, but I was wrong, it is indeed 8kb. I guess thats why it had the extra functionality. Apparently, the commodore 64's basic was also 8kb.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 12:40:15 am
content: Quote from: westfw on April 28, 2025, 11:29:37 pmSure, but even that stripped-down language was far ahead of the alternatives, like, say, front-panel programming or "machine language".

author: joeqsmith
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 01:11:17 am
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 22, 2025, 08:09:10 pmI've been sorting and pitching some of my old junk. Came across some of my old Altair assignments. No spell checkers and my spelling was and still is poor. The jist was you were given some problem, in this case calculating primes. Write a statement of the problem and explain how you were going to tackle it. Then code the whole thing by hand in assembler. Convert that to hex. Go to school and enter all those hex codes onto a dumb terminal attached to the Altair. Pray... There was no way to save anything and the editor on the Altair was poor at best.As bad as that sounds, I think the CS majors were using punch cards. We EEs avoided that. BTW, I really did enjoy the class. That assignment was an A but lost a few points for spelling and sloppy work.

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 02:28:35 am
content: Quote from: joeqsmith on April 29, 2025, 01:11:17 amWow... What I wouldn't give just to have some of my old Atari floppies with all the stuff I once did.Sad thing is that this would have been nothing more than 20 to 30 floppies, something I could have kept and archived today on modern media and able to run the stuff on any PC with an emulator.

author: 5U4GB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 04:34:21 am
content: For people outside the Aus/NZ realm of magazine distribution, computers running BASIC arestill being made today. That's the dev's web site, the projects are published through Silicon Chip magazine.

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 01:21:34 pm
content: Quote from: Analog Kid on April 28, 2025, 08:17:28 pmBeen there, done that. I've had to maintain the programs written by people who learned on BASIC and moved on to FORTRAN.You know, there's a reason that as soon as Turbo Pascal came out, nobody talked about BASIC any more. People who actually wanted to write production software ran as fast as they could from BASIC, and had to learn programming structure all over again.BASIC is great for those who thinking writing a program is fixing one error at a time until (eventually) it works. Pascal was a language that could be an error-free, running program from the first few minutes. I spent time adding detail instead of squashing bugs.Rick "learned BASIC and FORTRAN firat and found Pascal to finally allow real productivity" Denney

author: SiliconWizard
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 01:53:52 pm
content: BASIC, as the name implies, was really, uh, basic. It was simple enough to learn for beginners, it was simple to implement an interpreter for and that took only a few KB of code. That could run with as little as a few hundred bytes of RAM. Those are the reasons it was popular in home computers of the (late) 70s and 80s.There's otherwise little to like about it. Of course, later versions of BASIC improved to build on its popularity and they increasingly looked like structured languages, apart from its base syntax.In particular, the Sinclair QL BASIC was pretty good (SuperBasic I think it was called? not sure) in that regard. Later, Visual Basic did similar things and further improved - that ended up having little to do with original BASIC, apart from the name and some of the syntax.Turbo Pascal was a fantastic tool. You'll be surprised (unless you are using that yourself) to see that Delphi is definitely NOT dead, it's still widely used and to be fair, Embarcadero has done a great job at maintaining it and not letting it go down the drain, which was otherwise very likely to happen.The convenience and ease of use of BASIC has now been replaced with Python, for the most part.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 02:45:41 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 29, 2025, 01:21:34 pmExcept for Microsoft webservers. I had to use it for a deliberately small backend API; possibly called VB6. Horrible language experience; I had to work very hard to convince myself that it would work in, ahem, non-ideal circumstances.The real backend was written in Java.Worked well, overall, and that project won an FT awardQuoteYou mean vibe-codingBesides, that termination condition is wrong. It should be until "haven't run across the fundamental flaw yet" or "time runs out" or "boredom intervenes".

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 05:27:12 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 29, 2025, 02:45:41 pmMy memories far predate Visual BasicAnd I should have put "works" in quotes. I'm sill amazed by all the software I see that can't possibly be evaluated against real use cases, even if it isn't buggy, which it usually is. It makes me crazy. In the day, we didn't really know how to write and fulfill requirements systematically. We do now, even though that systems engineering process is still constantly under attack from the make-it-up-as-they-go fans.I wrote a Pascal program that provided a front end for a Fortran program that required batch processing from a text input file. It was thousands of lines of code. I wrote that with strict observance of top-down programming, and I think we ended up with fewer than a dozen bugs. Of course, event-driven structure and object-oriented inheritance really changed the way programs were organized--that came later.Rick "teaches systems engineering but really a domain expert" Denney

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 07:17:16 pm
content: Quote from: rdenney on April 29, 2025, 05:27:12 pmMy BASIC memories go back to a Varian 620Too many people can't/don't think about how the system (of whatever sort)fails, and what's necessary to recover from the failures. Bloody amateurs.Then there's the "non-functional behaviour" (retch) that can't be exercised in unit tests.Event driven is good, provided that the FSM is explicitly specified and coded. When it isn't, the informal hacked FSM rapidly becomes impossible to understand and correct/enhance. I once saw a case where adding customer-requested behaviour took6 months! If-then-else nested 10 deep, urgh.OO is good, if the principal mechanism used is composition of components, and inheritance is sparingly used. Done properly, it makes production performance and error detection trivial, and it can make it very easy to see which line of the FSM needs changing in the knowledge that nothing else will be affected.

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 29, 2025, 11:13:53 pm
content: QuoteYes. Particularly annoying is that the language itself does things that a user program can't (write() has a variable number of arguments, for example.) And it omitted features that were important in other languages, like formatted output and meaningful support for files. Your basic Pascal environment was pretty much only useful for teaching computer science.Fortunately (and like BASIC), there were plenty of Pascal environments that went beyond the basline specification and allowed useful code to be written.QuoteI don't think that follows. Put a Turbo-Pascal environment (IDE with full screen editor and fast compilation) against a BASIC where you had to type in a line at a time, with line numbers, and not necessarily in order, and I think it would be a pretty close contest.

author: westfw
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 02:41:25 am
content: QuoteTo when you were supposed to write your program (on paper) before the battle of 12 students for the 2 ttys that connected to the mainframe... (almost "batch." Except for the nerds who came in during lunch or after school or whatever. There were only 3 or 4 of those.)

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 10:42:47 am
content: Quote from: westfw on April 30, 2025, 02:41:25 amTTYs? That luxury came later....I had 5 channel paper tape at the local technical college, and was grateful for them. Some teletypes were 10cps, some 5cps. A machine I used, an Elliott 803, is still working in TMNoC. I bumbled across these pictures and (short!) videoshttps://hoc.lgfl.org.uk/resource.htmlOr punched card with one of these devices; IIRC you needed to punch up to 3 keys simultaneously for each character. Then send the cards away by post, and a week later you found you had omitted a semicolonNo, I didn't bother!

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:08:00 am
content: Quote from: westfw on April 29, 2025, 11:13:53 pmYep. Delphi, nowadays, is a long way from the original Pascal. It's a highly productive language.There is another, even better, version of Pascal: Oxygene, by RemObjects.If you have an anti-Pascal prejudice but are willing to change your mind, I strongly recommend you check them out.https://www.embarcadero.com/products/delphihttps://www.remobjects.com/elements/oxygene/

author: Zenith
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:29:04 am
content: I was never enthusiastic about Pascal, even though I was paid to write it for a time. I really couldn't see what the fuss was about.Years later I had to write an Windows application. it was up to me what language I used. I tried Visual BASIC and thought it was awful. Visual C++ was a nightmare, even though I started assuming that's what I'd use. Delphi was far the best. It was nothing to do with its Pascal origins. It was that they'd packaged the MFC very cleverly and effectively. I couldn't see why it wasn't more popular.There was a port to Linux called Kylix. They didn't seem to take it seriously and it didn't seem as good as the MS version.

author: gerbay
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:41:35 am
content: I learned object-oriented programming using Turbo Pascal in the DOS operating system. Borland provided Turbo Vision in the DOS environment and Object Windows libraries in the Windows environment with source codes. Borland's tools were always better than Microsoft's tools. Similar to Borland's Turbo Vision library, Microsoft had a library called CoW (Character Oriented Windows). Microsoft's text editors, including QBasic (Edit) that came with DOS, used this. Later, Windows and its API were developed based on Character Oriented Windows.

author: iMo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 12:46:50 pm
content: I wonder where all the numbers in the above video come from (the most popular lang. 1955-2025).. Especially prior, say, 1995..

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 12:52:45 pm
content: Quote from: westfw on April 29, 2025, 11:13:53 pmFormatted output? I did that all the time, whether for display on screens or on printouts. What Pascal did not do, because basically nobody did it, was typeset output with variable kerning, leading, and proportional spacing. Printers just didn't support that in those days.But it was not particularly challenging for me to write a Pascal program that created an Adobe Postscript file. Postscript was a page description language with good power that supported all those features, and could also be used for precision graphics without much difficulty. The structure of that language was stack-oriented and really quite elegant. My Pascal program could write about 4K of output that would create a page of complex engineering graphics on a Postscript-equipped printer. To support lesser printers, I incorporated Ghostscript--a Postscript interpreter that ran at print time.Pascal didn't provide a dozen different ways of doing things like C did, but the methods it did provide generally worked well enough for writing commercial-quality code by the standards of the day.Perhaps your "basic Pascal environment" was a much reduced version of Pascal compared to what was provided in Turbo Pascal, but I didn't think so at the time--the first Turbo didn't provide much more than did UCSD Pascal, which was the main (and expensive, and pseudo-code-constrained) alternative in those days.Of course, I'm talking 80's, not 70's when Pascal was a mainframe batch process on the CDC Dual-Cyber mainframes at the University of Texas at Austin (I had used Fortran at Texas A&M for batch processing on their Amdahl) and not 90's (when event-driven and object-oriented tools and techniques emerged with the rise of GUIs like in the Apple Lisa and then McIntosh, Windows, Gem Desktop, and others).Rick "biased by his own experiences" Denney

author: SteveThackery
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 01:27:44 pm
content: Quote from: Zenith on April 30, 2025, 11:29:04 amHmmm... I think its Pascal origins have to mean something, but of course what matters is what it is now. I've never understood the widespread disdain for anything Pascal-based - it feels a bit like uninformed prejudice when it comes to modern takes on the language, like Delphi and Oxygene.Quote from: Zenith on April 30, 2025, 11:29:04 amMuch more difficult to make money from a Linux app, I guess.

author: Kleinstein
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 04:08:24 pm
content: Delphi is more based on the object oriented extensions of Turbo pascal than the more standard pascal. The standard pascal, like standard Basic was limited in low level interfacing to the machine. However most compilers provides some extensions / libraries for this. However this part was not standardized and compiler specific. Delphi as essentially defined by the Borland compiler get a standardized library set from the dominant compiler.There are other follow ups from Pascal: Modula and Oberon, as more complete systems, up to the point of the Oberon OS, that is kind of an IDE and a bit more.The plain C is also missing a lot of functions that are now considered parts of the languish. Already printf is part of an library that not all enviromnets may support. Especially smaller µC version may skip or reduce those standard libraries. At least for C there is a standard set of library function, that should behave the same or similar (limits with system size). This part gives C much of it ease of use, but also adds a lot of add on functions to to "learn" and get used too. The libraries can cause quite some compatibility issues, despite of a standardized languish.

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 06:58:18 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 30, 2025, 10:42:47 amMy old personal paper tape editor (8 bit)...We also had an 8 byte acrylic matrix one in the office that wasa loteasier to use as it would span a complete paper tape patch sticker in one pass and had a transparent top plate. Mine was more wear resistant though (hardened steel die plate = cleaner holes).

author: ozcar
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 08:18:49 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 30, 2025, 10:42:47 amWhen I started working, some of my co-workers, essentially programmers, had those on their desks. Numeric characters required a single hole punched (as marked in the upper left quadrant on the keys in that photo). Upper case alphabetic characters needed two holes, and lower case needed three, but lower case was not used for program code. However some characters that were needed, like brackets, needed three holes, and the blokes that used those punches could contort their hands as required and punch quite quickly.Instead, I stuck with the luxurious IBM 029 keypunch machine, with a sort-of typewriter keyboard, which not only punched the required holes, but also printed a human-readable version along the top edge of the card (first example of dot-matrix printing that I ever saw, achieved mechanically using a device called a "code plate" which contrived to hit all dots required for a single character simultaneously). I guess you could say the IBM 029 was the first editor I ever used. It could duplicate a card, and by stopping that part way through a card you could type something different from that point, or change something and then copy the rest from the original card. You could even manage to insert characters, but that required a bit of skulduggery.I first encountered Basic on a Datapoint 2200, somewhere around 1973.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 08:53:45 pm
content: Quote from: Gyro on April 30, 2025, 06:58:18 pmGood for deleting characters, but left a lot to be desired when you needed to insert a character.Scissors plus sticky tape anyone?

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 08:58:24 pm
content: Quote from: ozcar on April 30, 2025, 08:18:49 pmThat's what you did with paper tape, of course.It becomes obvious why abominations like ex, ex, edlin were regarded as improvements. And why BASIC's line numbers were a good and sensible improvement.

author: David Hess
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:20:30 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on April 30, 2025, 08:58:24 pmI went from the line editor ED on CP/M to Wordstar's non-document mode, but considering the editors available today, ED on CP/M seems better and better.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 30, 2025, 11:27:17 pm
content: Quote from: David Hess on April 30, 2025, 11:20:30 pmOne thing that surprised me was how easy it was to create schematics and PCB layouts using only a keyboard and not a mouse. Orcad/MSDOS c1990 was much faster and easier than the Mental Graphics equivalent - for small/medium digital boards at least.

author: rdenney
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 01, 2025, 02:10:35 pm
content: Quote from: ozcar on April 30, 2025, 08:18:49 pmI used IBM keypunch machines while in college. Our engineering department had a machine in a niche in the hallway which I preferred to the noisy computer center. But in those days I had Public-School-Mouth couple with clumsy fingers. After screwing up three cards in a row, I let loose with a general description of how I felt about the world at that moment. A professor emerged from his office and scolded me for my foul language--he was the professor the students did NOT want to draw for concrete design. Of course, I was in his class the next semester. We had a right to be afraid of him--he was a Combat Engineer during WWII and had survived landing on Utah Beach on D-Day. Let the record show that my lips cleaved together as if my mouth had been utterly removed after that scolding.Rick "where's the %(*#&*&$#! backspace key?" Denney

author: Conrad Hoffman
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 03:05:04 am
content: I learned to program on an early IBM PC using Basica or the BASIC compiler on a floppy. I eventually went to Turbo BASIC, which was written by the late Bob Zale. Sold and re-bought by him, it became PowerBASIC. A really excellent BASIC that I've used ever since. Whatever style of programming you like, it supports it. Fast and compact. Alas, Bob died and the program has been frozen ever since. There's still a forum and an owner, but no further development, say a 64-bit version. Still, I continue to use it since I have history with it and it lacks little. IMHO, C++ is only good for people who use it on a regular basis and have better memories than mine. Legacy C code is often a nightmare for current programmers to support. I tried to learn it but have always detested it. Only thing worse is LISP!

author: guenthert
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 11:51:50 am
content: Well, there was also BCPL, notable for being the implementation language of early versions of AmigaOS (a bit of an anachronism then methinks, as there surely were sufficiently capable C compilers for the MC68K already around). As it is byte-code interpreted, I'd think compiler, byte-code interpreter and editor could be ROMable and at least conceivable have been an alternative to BASIC. It probably won't fit into 8KiB though...Nah, I just thought that was an opportunity to mention the very nice introductory text (with interesting examples):https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mr10/bcpl4raspi.pdfShame just, that it's for an utterly obsolete language.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 12:41:34 pm
content: Quote from: guenthert on May 02, 2025, 11:51:50 amI would expect old masters like Martin Richards to provide succinct and interesting examples, and he did.Shame more youngsters don't achieve that, but emit dumbed down "I unboxed it and it looks good" and "this is a for loop's syntax" videos lasting 20 minutes.

author: ve1nhb
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 01:36:55 pm
content: I think all the ones with COBOL did not sell very well.

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 01:42:28 pm
content: Hey, I learned COBOL. It taught me to spell environment!

author: dave j
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 02:07:53 pm
content: Quote from: guenthert on May 02, 2025, 11:51:50 amFrom theWikipedia page for MetaComCo:QuoteMy understanding is that King demonstrated a version of TRIPOS with the AmigaOS kernel developed in two weeks and that convinced Commodore to go with it.

author: tggzzz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 02:37:20 pm
content: Quote from: tggzzz on May 02, 2025, 12:41:34 pmI should add, I have seen two other equally good language documents...One was Gosling's 1996 Java White Paper, which described which concepts were included, which concepts were excluded (at least as important!), and why the included concepts "played well together". Overall an exercise in good taste, which is rare in the computer language field, which is normally littered with kitchen sinks.The second was XMOS xC. It too described what was included, and what had been excised from standard C. It described how the language, processor and i/o hardware were designed as a conceptual unit, which is unheard of in computing.Both documents were a delight to read, and both languages were a delight to use - with no unpleasant "gotcha" surprises.

author: Analog Kid
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: May 02, 2025, 05:03:53 pm
content: Quote from: ve1nhb on May 02, 2025, 01:36:55 pmI know that's a, that's a, you're making a joke there, son.But really: there weren't any home computers ever that came with COBOL, were there?Quote from: Gyro on May 02, 2025, 01:42:28 pmGood one. Also "procedure" and "identification".(I was a COBOL programmer and actually enjoyed it.)