We would not be here were it not for DTSS

I wrote 900 lines of assembler for the PDP8 I used back in 1967. The program forms appendix 2 of my Ph.D. thesis (pages 226-251). The description of what it did (and why it did it that way) is on pages 55 to 71.

It wasn't a kiddy project, and it ran on interrupts from three different sources, which made life interesting.

The idiocy is all yours.

An interpreter is just another compiler. The stupidiy is all yours.

There were lots of reason to build cheap computers. In 1980 I was working o n the Teletex system - not Teletext, but rather a scheme to replace the Tel ex system with communicating word processors. Part of the job was putting t ogether the word processor, which looked remarkably like an IBM PC (which w as first introduced in August 1981). At one point we suggested to marketing that the machine could also sell as office computer, and they took us seri ously enough to estimate the number they could sell - about 150 per year, w hich does seem to have been an under-estimate.

Probably true, but not commercially significant.

Visicalc was the program that got personal computers into small business. T he that published it - Dan Flystra - persuaded my wife that a founding subs cription to Byte would be a nice present for me. His other suggestions were less persuasive.

I'm sure that you can persuade yourself that this is true. Your own connect ion to reality doesn't seem to be all that secure.

BASIC did not have FORMAT, COMMON, EQUIVALENCE statements and other oddities (such as spaces in names), but it had character strings which FORTRAN II/IV did not have.

What prevents compiling BASIC programs ? An interpreter is required only for languages that support self modifying source programs. This is a different thing as self modifying instructions, which only needed program storage in R/W memory.

There has been BASIC source interpreters, converters to some intermediate format as well as fully compiled implementations.

For evaluating arithmetic expressions, you do not need recursion, one could convert the expression to RPN and execute it in a software stack. Early Fortrans also had limits of expression complexity, e.g. a table index could only be of the constant1 * indexVar + constant2 form, in which constant1 and/or constanr2 could be omitted.

The control structures in Basic and Fortran II/IV were primitive. Fortran-77 introduced block structures.

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y do what you could do faster with a more appropriate language doesn't make a good choice.

ind of advance. Teaching lots of undergraduates to program was a good idea, but that's it.

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the world.

it didn't change the world.

in frame.

A time shared system offers each user a tiny slice of the main frame.

did change the world to some extent.

But Dartmouth didn't invent it. The idea of a switching a processor between tasks goes back a long way. The PDP8 I did my thesis work on was set up fo r interrupt control and I used three level of interrupt in the program I wr ote for it (which did involve checking where each interrupt had come from)

- so clearly the idea had been around when the PDP-8 was being developed, a nd it was introduced in 1965.

There was never a FORTRAN mindset. It was just programming language - a rather clunky one, but complete. There was a lot of good stuff written in FORTRAN which wasn't worth re-writing in later languages, so people have kept on using it.

Having built and worked on many compilers and interpreters in my career, I can confidently assert that this is utterly false.

A compiler builds a symbolic version of some code in order to emit equivalent code in another language.

An interpreter merely executes the instructions in the source code.

A tokenising interpreter builds a symbolic representation of the input syntax (and executes that), but does not produce a symbolic model of the intent (semantics).

Pascal's P-code was "another language" produced by a real compiler, but to make the job easier, the target language was for a VM, not the target hardware - so the job of producing equivalent machine code was not necessary.

The original Basic was a pure source-code interpreter, but there are later implementations of similar languages that use each of the above approaches.

Please stop this pissing contest.

CH

Yeah, it's not the language, it's the widespread AVAILABILITY of a language that matters; there weren't a lot of FORTRAN or APL or ALGOL machines on the consumer market, but Commodore, Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early 1980s) machines that, out-of-the-box, could run BASIC. That was an improvement on the CP/M machines offered in the seventies.

The Macintosh broke that mold (you could get BASIC, but that wasn't standard equipment). The GUI options favored more modern environments (like, Excel - which was Macintosh-only at introduction).

For my Mac, there was a BASIC but also FORTRAN and APL. And did array-processor things for work, using the graphic-terminal capability of the good old toaster.

yeh, how many people got into a career of programming from their first taste of programming basic on one of the 17 million C64s sold

Bill Sloman wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

You left out what it ran on. That is how one dates their "first computer".

I used actual IBM XTs at my workplace in 1986 to make 4X PCB layouts with AutoCAD 2.

My first PC was a NextStep 286 though. That easily pinpoints the timeline as being after the 286 came out.

Your thing could be a 286 or a 386, etc. but just mentioning the line does not pinpoint the model or the year.

I guess it could even be an XT clone, but the clone makers started with the 286 in most cases. There were not too many that started with the 8088. Save for like Heathkit or such.

Lasse Langwadt Christensen wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

It is amazing how many C64 rescue videos are out there.

ote:

se some people never got around to learning anything better.

ge that matters; there weren't a lot of FORTRAN or APL or ALGOL machines on the consumer market, but Commodore, Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM deliver ed (early 1980s) machines that, out-of-the-box, could run BASIC.

The machines don't run a particular programing language.

They run whatever software they are loaded with.

Quite often you have to install the Linux operating system to get access to the compiler you want.

You are confusing the operating system with the compilers that came with it .

ard equipment). The GUI options favored more modern environments (like, Exc el - which was Macintosh-only at introduction).

Apple did try harder than most to stop you running non-Apple software. It w asn't a virtue.

rocessor things for work, using the graphic-terminal capability of the good old toaster.

So you didn't know what was going on under the bonnet.

MS/DOS was the operating system, if I remember rightly.

You have my deepest sympathy.

It would have done if you'd lived in t eh UK at the time - that late 1980s.

It was 8086 based..

Amstrad was a lot more mass market than that.

Many basic dialects (eg BASICA, QBASIC) support some form of eval() these dialects don't compile.

They do if it's in ROM.

No secrecy problem from Apple; the APL was from Portable Software, the Fortran came from Absoft, and Excel from Microsoft... and the terminal emulator was written by a user

Oh, I made and used a few long T15 screwdrivers back in the day. And volumes one through six of Inside Macintosh still sit on my shelf.

pretty much, albeit not the classic kind of idiot. The huge narcissistic ego does him no favours.

Bill Sloman wrote in news:9bdd6032-3d58-4935- snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

I was referring the the processor that line had.

Bill Sloman wrote in news:9bdd6032-3d58-4935- snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

It was an improvement over 4X tape layouts.

You should deserve sympathy for your psychopathy, but you do not.

d.

ecause some people never got around to learning anything better.

odore, Apple, TI 99/4, Atari, and IBM delivered (early 1980s) machines that , out-of-the-box, could run BASIC.

The processor doesn't care if it reading data out of ROM or from some other kind of memory. If the manufacturer went to the trouble of building in a p articular software on ROM, it's always there, but you can pretty much alway s get what you want from some other source.

tandard equipment). The GUI options favored more modern environments (like, Excel - which was Macintosh-only at introduction).

It wasn't a virtue.

ay-processor things for work, using the graphic-terminal capability of the good old toaster.

rtran came from Absoft, and Excel from Microsoft... and the terminal emula tor was written by a user.

It wasn't a secrecy problem, just a commercial decision.

lumes one through six of Inside Macintosh still sit on my shelf.

So you chose to pay half as much again for your processing hardware as you needed to. It keeps life simple, but it isn't an economical approach.