Comment by WalterBright
10 hours ago
> a new BASIC interpreter for the 1983 Mattel ECS add-on for Intellivision
Fun fact: Hal Finney (yes, that Hal) wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Intellivision back in 1978 or so in a weekend. It was 2K of code. Mattel shipped it on a cartridge.
ROM space was so tight, the only error message it produced was:
EH?
Which Hal was very proud of. He showed it to me to make me laugh. At the time I was programming the Mattel Intellivision Roulette cartridge.
That's hilarious. I wonder how many corners he cut on that. Is there a disassembly floating around somewhere?
The Level I BASIC for the TRS-80 (which only shipped with 4 KiB of memory originally) had three error messages: WHAT? (syntax errors and the like); HOW? (illegal operations like divide by zero); and SORRY (out of memory).
BootOS, the 512-byte OS written by Oscar Toledo (author of this article), also has a single error message, "Oops".