"There were a lot of interesting versions of BASIC done for Japanese machines this article misses (..)"
Most likely referring to MSX-Basic. Which shows it's (c) Microsoft on the startup screen.
Not the fastest, but a very full-featured Basic compared to most Basics around @ the time. Iirc it does non-integer math on BCD coded values. Single & double precision, so users can decide RAM use/speed/precision tradeoffs.
Maybe there were other Japanese machines using MS-supplied Basics before that. But if so, likely few (any?) after MSX was introduced ('83), since that was big in Japan leaving little room for 8-bit competitors.
My very first computer was a Spectravideo MSX computer which I got in exchange for writing some demo programs for the midwest distributor for the company. Fun little machine, although I still preferred Apple in general.
Nice! From that comment:
"There were a lot of interesting versions of BASIC done for Japanese machines this article misses (..)"
Most likely referring to MSX-Basic. Which shows it's (c) Microsoft on the startup screen.
Not the fastest, but a very full-featured Basic compared to most Basics around @ the time. Iirc it does non-integer math on BCD coded values. Single & double precision, so users can decide RAM use/speed/precision tradeoffs.
Maybe there were other Japanese machines using MS-supplied Basics before that. But if so, likely few (any?) after MSX was introduced ('83), since that was big in Japan leaving little room for 8-bit competitors.
My very first computer was a Spectravideo MSX computer which I got in exchange for writing some demo programs for the midwest distributor for the company. Fun little machine, although I still preferred Apple in general.
What do you think his hn username is? :)
billg. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=billg
Actual billg would probably not have posted, er, teenwag.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6121.
(It was killed as spam but I've unkilled it now so it's visible to users who don't have 'showdead' turned on.)
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