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Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC

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On 2014-09-02 19:21, RS Wood wrote:
> 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).

Don't the high-end programmable calculators do that sort of thing now?
ISTR a TI Voyage-200 running an emulator for one of the Sinclair
computers (probably the QL).

Speaking of which, the BBC and QL micros ran structured dialects of
basic. The GOTO and GOSUB commands were still there, but weren't
necessary as defined functions and procedures could be used instead. I
wrote a fair few homebrewed modular astronomy and astrodynamics programs
in QL basic.

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Thread

Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Rich <rich@example.invalid> - 2014-09-02 09:57 +0000
  Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Tim Streater <timstreater@greenbee.net> - 2014-09-02 12:25 +0100
  Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Hils <hils@saynotospam.net> - 2014-09-02 19:19 +0100
  Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC RS Wood <rsw@therandymon.com> - 2014-09-02 18:21 +0000
    Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Hils <hils@saynotospam.net> - 2014-09-02 20:51 +0100
      Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2014-09-02 22:58 +0300
        Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Paul Sture <nospam@sture.ch> - 2014-09-02 22:20 +0200
        Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Bruce Horrocks <07.013@scorecrow.com> - 2014-09-04 00:21 +0100
          Re: Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC Marko Rauhamaa <marko@pacujo.net> - 2014-09-04 08:44 +0300

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