BASIC was not just a programming language
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Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#2> The Amstrad CPC 646 would literally take less than a second to boot
Wow.
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#3> The Amstrad CPC 646 would literally take less than a second to boot Wow.
Everything was in ROM: 16k BASIC, 16k operating system, optional 16k disk operating system. The 464 (“646” is a typo) shipped with a cassette deck, not a floppy disk drive, so there was no possibility of loading the OS from volatile storage.
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#4I agree that dropping into the basic interpreter was amazing on the old 8 bit computers. Things have really changed recently with the popularity of Retro computing as I wrote about the exact same thing around 10-15 years ago (I can't find the post unfortunately) and I was downvoted a lot as almost all the commenters seemed to think that accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that same thing as the interactive Basic mode of a Commodore 64 in my case. Oh, how times have changed for the better now :)
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#5> The Amstrad CPC 646 would literally take less than a second to boot Wow.
Everything was in ROM: 16k BASIC, 16k operating system, optional 16k disk operating system. The 464 (“646” is a typo) shipped with a cassette deck, not a floppy disk drive, so there was no possibility of loading the OS from volatile storage.
> so there was no possibility of loading the OS from volatile storage.
There are exceptions to this rule: Sharp was known for their concept of "clean computers" (MZ series and X1), which came only with a simple monitor in ROM, while at the same time featuring just a cassette drive to load a BASIC interpreter (of which there were several flavors) from.
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#6> If you ran out of numbers, the renum command would recompute all the line numbers for you.
This is the first time I heard of such a BASIC command, even though I grew up learning to program on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.
Which of the home computers of the time had this command? Would it renumber in multiples of 10?
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#7> The Amstrad CPC 646 would literally take less than a second to boot Wow.
Everything was in ROM: 16k BASIC, 16k operating system, optional 16k disk operating system. The 464 (“646” is a typo) shipped with a cassette deck, not a floppy disk drive, so there was no possibility of loading the OS from volatile storage.
You could attach an external floppy drive (I believe it was called FDD-1) to CPC464 and run CP/M 2.2 on it. https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/CP/M_2.2
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#8> The Amstrad CPC 646 would literally take less than a second to boot Wow.
I once read about an OS that booted before the floppy had fully spun up, and was inspired, only to discover when I tried it myself that at computer speeds, even with the floppy seek to load a kernel from a FAT image, it's actually rather easy.
(to be fair, I think media corruption was more common back then, so boot-time file system checks and other sanity checks may have been what kept mainstream boots slower?)
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everything was in ROM: 16k BASIC, 16k operating system, optional 16k disk operating system. The 464 (“646” is a typo) shipped with a cassette deck, not a floppy disk drive, so there was no possibility of loading the OS from volatile storage.
You could attach an external floppy drive (I believe it was called FDD-1) to CPC464 and run CP/M 2.2 on it. https://www.cpcwiki.eu/index.php/CP/M_2.2
DDI-1. It was a package including the disk interface (with AMSDOS in ROM and CP/M 2.2 partly in ROM) plus the drive itself. The FDD-1 was an optional second drive but you had to have the DDI-1 first.
Re: BASIC was not just a programming language
#10> If you ran out of numbers, the renum command would recompute all the line numbers for you. This is the first time I heard of such a BASIC command, even though I grew up learning to program on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Which of the home computers of the time had this command? Would it renumber in multiples of 10?
Amstrad CPC (Locomotive BASIC) and the BBC Micro both had it. In the CPC implementation, at least, you could choose the starting line number and the increment, e.g. RENUM 100,5