Lost lessons from the 8-bit BASIC era

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in code on (#2S0G)
Call it wistful nostalgia, perhaps, but this guy isn't alone in recalling fondly how much you could do with so little on 8 bit BASIC machines.
The little language that fueled the home computer revolution has been long buried beneath an avalanche of derision, or at least disregarded as a relic from primitive times. That's too bad, because while the language itself has serious shortcomings, the overall 8-bit BASIC experience has high points that are worth remembering.

It's hard to separate the language and the computers it ran it on; flipping the power switch, even without a disk drive attached, resulted in a BASIC prompt. ... There's a small detail that I skipped over: entering a multi-line program on a computer in a department store. Without starting an external editor. Without creating a file to be later loaded into the BASIC interpreter (which wasn't possible without a floppy drive).
Yes, what we do with computers is so much more complex now. But I do miss getting a working machine less than 1 second after turning on the on switch. I suspect I'm not alone.

Re: Not how I remember it... (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-09-09 21:57 (#2S7Q)

Today's PCs could more or less do that today if the BIOS was well engineered. I don't know exactly what the factory BIOS is doing for all that time, but it certainly isn't just what is needed to bring the system up.

I have seen Coreboot systems (then LinuxBIOS) come up to a single user mode shell in 3 seconds from power-on.
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