And yet, it was all Microsoft BASIC. At least in the Apple and Commodore world.
Mostly.
Apple’s first BASIC, Integer BASIC, was created by Steve Wozniak entirely on his own. Their second BASIC, Applesoft, was indeed a Microsoft product, though with a few of Apple’s own tweaks. The vocabulary of the first BASIC influenced choices made in the second. (For example, all the low-res graphics commands were kept the same, and the new high-res graphics commands resembled the low-res ones.)
Also, Apple’s extensions to the BASIC interpreter to interact with their DOS operating system stayed exactly the same between both versions.
Not foreign to them - they just looked at the big picture. I was friends with a guy who was a VP at Commodore with the C64 was released. Jack Tramiel let it go with known bugs, deciding it was cheaper for customers to do final test. It worked - Commodore made a fortune and almost drove TI into bankruptcy.
RS Basic originally was MS, the MS software I have used the most extensively.
Debian, Ice Weasel, and Open Office forever.
I’ve helped several students find research for papers on Commodore and Tramiels an example of bad marketing and management. They were apparently notorious for bad customer support and hidden glitches.
Ah, yes, the PET killer POKE.
A friend of mine said she hooks her’s up at Christmas (it was a hand me down from her brother, she didn’t use it when it was new) because about once a year she has to play Raid Over Moscow again.
Here’s a somewhat amusing 1985 interview with Jack Tramiel. He seems bored by his own product line, and then leaves the set rather abruptly when the interview is done.
Also — and I should have thought of this already, since I’m a fan of the show — here’s a 1988 episode of the Computer Chronicles showing off the Commodore 64 and some of the things people were doing with them.
Of course the VIC-20 fell far short of all that. It was pretty much dead and buried by then.
Recommended reading: On The Edge: the spectacular rise and fall of Commodore. Not a Pulitzer Prize candidate, but it has lots of testimony from the people who worked there.
(Not from Jack Tramiel himself, though, if I remember correctly.)
Jack knew he was selling a consumer product and not a traditional computer. I don’t know how one could call the C64 an example of bad management and marketing when it trounced the competition - and I am certainly not denying the bugs and customer support issues. (Actually, what customer support? You had a problem in the warranty period, you returned it for a new one. Outside the warranty period? You bought a new one.)
The big competition as the time was the TI machine. It’s design didn’t seem nearly as good to me, though I assume it was of better quality. It also had higher manufacturing costs. When TI tried to beat the C64 on price, they nearly went bankrupt. TI had Bill Cosby, but Commodore still sold more.
I had moved on to the C-64 by the time I discovered modems (with my 1702 monitor and 1541 floppy drive— no more pokey Datasette! I thought I was bad-ass…) but the VIC-20 could’ve been used as well. The limited number of columns made it kind of crappy— the C-64 at least had 40 columns, and I had a terminal program that performed an eye-straining simulation of an 80-column display.
In addition to the BBSes, I spent a lot of time on a pre-Internet dial-up chat system… six lines, local phone number, and when it was full you’d get a busy signal waiting for someone to log off. Some of the people I met on it are my good friends to this day. When IRC, and then Internet chatrooms came around, I’d already had my fill.
I have fond memories of painstakingly typing dozens of lines of BASIC code from a magazine into my VIC-20… then enjoying the resulting game for as long as I could. Before I sprang for the cassette drive, powering the computer off meant goodbye to whatever you were working on, unless you wanted to type it all in again.
You guys had punch tape to write programs on? I would have KILLED for punch tape! I had to write my programs using CUNEIFORM TABLETS! No changing those babies once they were baked, nosirree! (Granted, they archive data pretty well … not lossy at all)
Raid Over Moscow is literally the first real C=64 game, and the first pirated C=64 game, that I was ever exposed to. Coming from my MC-10 background, it was a good game. My friend who had the game had told me that he wrote it over the weekend. I almost believed him.
C-64 Pop Quiz!
What does this code do?
Googling is not allowed. Please try to answer from memory as best as you can.
well spin my propeller.
Commodore USA is/will have new models of the VIC, 64 and Amiga.
intel inside. comes with linux.
The gears in my brain are grinding hard. It has something to do with changing the screen. I think it is the background and font color.
I haven’t seen the TI994A mentioned here. It was a very good computer also. I brought it with me when I came to Colombia in 1985. It was confiscated by the customs officials. They said it was contraband. I had it equipped with an expansion box and color monitor.
Very good. Just the part in red is incorrect.
Well, it sets the screen to a solid color (those are border and background POKEs.) However, I don’t remember what color. I’d guess “1” is black. Or possibly white.
Ah, the color codes. I forget what the Color computer used. I do remember being disappointed they didn’t use the resistor color codes that everybody knew. 1 = brown
Much of the serious use of those early computers was done by technically oriented people.