Re: Yay! Finally got myself a IIgs!

[et472@FreeNet.Carleton.CA (Michael Black)]

 (heuser.marcus@freenet.de) writes:
> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>>
>> "Wierd" is perhaps the wrong word.  It was the absence of good
>> documentation of the hardware and software systems that made it
>> "strange"--and you had to be an official developer to get that
>> info.
> 
> Ah, ok -- sounds uncomfortable.
> 
>> Compare this to the II, for which ROM listings and schematics
>> were standard equipment.
> 
> In my eyes the II was the exception from the rule, anyway.
> The later models (e/c/gs) didn't have it as standard, or am I wrong?
> (Not to speak about Ataris or most/all Commodores)
> 
>> And the II had a programming language built in!
> 
> This didn't stop IBM or others (Amiga, ST, Mac) - and the age of the
> consumer-user dawned...
> 
When I got my Atari ST, that never did work properly (it was a clearance
item), it came with a BASIC on floppy disk.  And of course, the original
IBM has BASIC in rom.

I think one reason there was a wave of home computers with BASIC
in ROM was, apart from inertia, a desire to let the user have
something to do out of the box.  Until you bought something more,
be it a program or extra hardware, there wasn't all that much you
could do with those things, especially if you didn't program.  Having
BASIC in ROM let the user at least make some noise or display something
on the screen.  And of course, that was the days of computer magazines
where one could enter the latest BASIC program and get something going
that way.  In effect, BASIC in rom gave you a higher level monitor,
certainly if you had it you could get other things going.

My first two computers, the only real thing I could use them for
was to play with programming.  They lacked too much to have much useful
purpose.  It was only with the Radio Shack Color Computer, and floppy
disk drive, in 1984 that I used a computer for something other than
programming as an end in itself.

   Michael