Comment by giantdude

3 years ago

I always thought that Apple ][ + was as good as it gets. It's been downhill from there, for Apple and for the rest of us.

6 comments

giantdude

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jamiek88  3 years ago

Once I got good at typing on it my Acorn Electron (we couldn’t afford the whizzy bbc master!) was an extension of my brain.

Instant response. A full reboot was a control break away. Instant access to the interpreter. Easy assembly access.

I thought, it executed.

I remember our school moving from the networked bbc’s to the PC’s and it was a huge downgrade for us as kids. Computer class became operating a word processor or learning win 3.11 rather than the exciting and sometimes adversarial (remote messaging other terminals, spoofing etc) system that made us want to learn, to just more drudgery.

  • snoot  3 years ago

    I agree with all of this except for one point:

    Having an ordinary key on the keyboard that would effectively kill -9 the current program and clear the screen was a crazy design decision, especially for a machine where saving data meant using a cassette tape!

    • jamiek88  3 years ago

      The break key unless you held down control was only a soft break though.

      Your program would still be in memory with an \>OLD command.

      As long as it was a basic prog, the machine code loaded *RUN was lost and had to be reloaded from tape, yes.

      A pain for games but I don’t really recall accidentally pressing the break key much it was out of the way up right.

      I could talk about this all day!

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