Comment by 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!
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!
It’s true that you could get a basic program back with old.
But any data was lost and I saw break get pressed accidentally fairly often at school and amongst friends.
Fair. Not everyone spent 12 hours per day on their computer like me! They probably had friends and stuff. :)