Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)

idk about that

I mean, all of that is grand but you remain for, for from the metal in all these instances and even in assembly you cannot go under several layers of abstraction with modern architectures

in the days of 6502 and Z80 compatible microprocessors, you could go down to the NAND gate level, to the transistor level - it was doable, not that it made much sense to go there for most people, but it was nearly a requirement to know how many cycles did each instruction take and lock conditions like bus access when dealing with different parts of the memory, etc

there were essentially no hard black boxes then, and now there are many at the hardware level and even the OS level is too impenetrable; not even the CTOs of major OS companies and initiatives have a complete understanding of the OS they produce, perhaps a few select ones have a functional understanding with only 2 or 3 black boxes involved (specific driver magic, hardware detail that goes under C and assembly optimisation etc - which typically outsourced specialists deal with)

GPUs alone these days are more complex than the entirety of the systems back then, and the implications of this are two-fold:

- the culture on the producer end is that software, machines and accessories are sold as black boxes, both by expectations and by enforcement on the manufacturer's end that gets no incentive whatsoever to expose internals of their product, and many reasons to the contrary as the competition might use it; these dynamics are extending to repair-ability as well

- the culture on the consumer end is that internals are not possible to deal with, are best taken for granted and the curiosity is just not there anymore; also if things break you just get new things, which disincentives also producing anything meant to last, as the assumption is that it will be obsolete soon anyway, or the system will just stop working, reinforcing that dynamic and cheapening the value of work

Often they were programmed in machine code. The BASIC listing was just a tiny loader and the actual program in hexdecimal strings. The loader decoded the strings, poked them into memory and then called the start address.

The manuals that came with the Commodore VIC-20 and 64 were excellent; they gave a good foundation for learning BASIC, and teased you into getting into lower-level machine code. And once you got to that point, the Reference Manual really go you to very low level detail.

https://archive.org/details/Personal_Computing_On_The_VIC-20... https://archive.org/details/VIC-20_Programmers_Reference_Gui...

I was a teen in the 80s. I was lucky enough to hang out at the local university and got to use their terminals that had a printer instead of a display.

School had an Apple II but wouldn't let students use them. Instead they forced them to use punch cards so I didn't take the class. Instead I used a Commodore PET that was on display at a department store.

Eventually owned an Apple II clone and and IBM PC clone. First work computer was a Compaq Luggable with an amazing orange phosphor monochrome display.

Before the Internet was available we used BBSs, and Compuserve. BBSs were horrible little fiefdoms run but basement dwelling trolls.

Networking was still a toss up between Ethernet and Arhnet. I liked Arcnet. You had to configure interrupts, ports, buad rates, stop bits, and parity for the IDE network cards. It was a pain.

Most business LANS used Novell Netware or Lantastic. I loved Lantastic, it was easy and even had a voice over network feature. Still have a t-shirt from them somewhere.

The Internet arrived before Windows was usable and Microsoft wasn't ready. So you had to use a SOCKS client.

I made a lot of money in those days simply by hanging out in the computer section of the big book store. Managers would wander in like Bambi on a highway. When they saw me reading a book on computers they inevitably asked questions. It turned in to consulting work.

Fun times but also very frustrating. No real multi user, buggy products and operating systems, Linux was still very much 'assembly required'.

Now we have non-typed, high level, abstracted languages, and agile methodologies which are possibly a step too far in the other direction.

the C64 didn't ship with it, but there were Forth systems available, notably "64 Forth" which was a superset of Fig-Forth