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From: RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com>
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC
Date: 2 Sep 2014 18:21:22 GMT
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On 2014-09-02, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
> http://prog21.dadgum.com/198.html
>
>  It's hard to separate the language and the computers it ran it on;
>  flipping the power switch, even without a disk drive attached,
>  resulted in a BASIC prompt. If nothing else, it could be treated as
>  a calculator: PRINT "seconds in a week: ",60*60*24*7 or PRINT
>  COS(2)/2 Notice how the cosine function is always available for
>  use. No importing a library. No qualifying it with MATH.TRIG.

I definitely do miss turning on a machine and having a workable system
one second later.  Yeah I know, modern machines do more, blah blah blah,
but instantaneous gratification was pretty fun.  Also cartridges.
Imagine modern hardware with a cartridge slot - how fun!  (They exist.
They're called hot-swappable SCSI drives, or maybe boot from /dev/sdb
usb drives, or equivalent).