MSX History: The Platform Microsoft Forgot | Hacker News Reader

MSX History: The Platform Microsoft Forgot

tedium.co

147 pointsartsandsci84 comments

I had a Toshiba MSX (in the UK) as my first computer. My parents bought me that, convinced by the salesman's hype, when everyone else was buying Spectrums and Commodores. At the time it was a pain because not all the good games came out on MSX, but I loved that thing. It taught me BASIC, got me interested in computer-based music (BASIC programmes with endless PLAY statements) and got me into computing rather than just using a computer. I'll always have a soft spot for MSX.

Pretty much same story here. I got Spectravideo SVI-738 with integrated disk drive. Being able to run CP/M on it didn’t really do much when everyone else were having C64s and playing Pirates. :)

Same but having grown up in Brazil I had a Gradiente Expert [1].

It was a really nice computer console with 2 cartridge slots which were most of the time occupied by a 5"1/4 floppy drive and sometimes a Data-corder [2][3] (to load software - games - off cassette tapes). It was fun to start loading the tape, then going to play in the garden for 30min-1h as it read the tape, just to come back and see that it had failed and then try again - and play more in the garden.

I also learned BASIC, some assembly which was required to add cheats to games before they loaded, and even used to do simple animations from basic geometric shapes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gradiente_Expert [2] https://youtu.be/SZtkQp1mbQg?t=41 [3] http://files.datassette.org/tech/data_corder_dr1.pdf

"The most obscure part of Microsoft's history." That's a pretty high bar.

Here are a couple other candidates (restricted to stuff that actually shipped as products):

* QuickPascal - Microsoft's low end Pascal competitor to Turbo Pascal. (The full MS Pascal might be a reasonable candidate too.)

* MS Access, the communications package. (Predates the database of the same name.)

* Softcard - Z80 coprocessor board for the Apple ][. (The Mach 10 and Mach 20 PC accelerator oards arn't bad choices either. The Mach 20 was a plug in board for PC's that itself had expansion slots.)

* Multiplan - the spreadsheet precursor to Excel.

* The runtime-only version of MS Windows. (Bundled with Excel to let people that didn't have Windows run Excel.)

* Visual BASIC _for DOS_ - Exactly what it sounds like, but running in text mode DOS.

MS Bob?

I think that omission is mainly my own bias, which stems from my age... I had been paying attention to the industry then and at the time it got a bunch of press. Bob's also interesting in that Melinda Gates was involved in marketing that project, and she considers it her biggest flop:

https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/the-lesson-melinda-gates-lea...

MS Xenix is another one that might ought to be on that list. So much of Microsoft's image is built around Windows that the notion of a Microsoft without Windows and selling a 'Unix' has got to be startling to the vast majority of folks.

Bob was and is pretty famous. Obscure in the sense that few people used it (I did!) but it's well-known, probably moreso than anything on that list.

Known as a failure, sure, but still well-known.

MSX was a hit in Brazil largely because of our closed market at the time, where importing computers was always very expensive and often illegal. A computer had to be a "national" product, even if that meant just a clone of foreign machines built with mostly imported parts (and very often violating copyright, e.g. I had a ZX Spectrum clone which manufacturer was sued by Sinclair, unsuccessfully, despite copying even the ROM code). In that environment the MSX was a great solution, local companies could join the party of selling a computer/peripherals/SW that benefited from a (hoped) worldwide market, without the costs of licensing or the hurdles of straight piracy.

Another MSX computer from Japan that you could find in a music store? The Roland S samplers from the mid to late 80s to early 90s. The S10, S50, and S330/550 are at their heart MSX standard computers. The basically impossible to find mouse was a standard MSX mouse, and its possible to use a PS2 mouse with an adapter widely available on Ebay. These samplers were 12 bit with a choice of a 15 or 30khz sample rate. Great for digital aliasing noises a'la Sp-1200. They had the additional benefit of a really good digital filter that was available before the Akai S-950. I had and used an S-550 for years, but it really is a pain in the butt to use, even with the mouse or the programmer. Other gear surpassed it in popularity for a pretty good reason, but that sampler was still a pretty amazing piece of gear...

For me here in Sweden, it was a Spectravideo 728. Truly the reason I got into computers. It never was a big platform here so never saw many big games. And a couple of years later I switched to an Amiga.

There are quite a few emulators available:

- fMSX is multiplatform: https://fms.komkon.org/fMSX/

- RuMSX: http://www.lexlechz.at/en/software/RuMSX.html

It's been a few years since I used any of them so can't vouch for quality.

I like http://webmsx.org/ a lot. Works right inside your browser.

openmsx is the best one.

https://openmsx.org/

I wrote a lot of code for Yamaha MSX systems back in the day. It was truly a delight to be able to see ones programs running on different machines with .. mostly .. ease.

For me, the thing that made MSX fail was over-standardisation - it was very difficult for manufacturers to stand out from the pack. Often, the machines all felt the same, so consumers would buy the machines on the basis of style - and there were some truly atrociously ugly MSX machines being designed in those days. (In some ways, its quite similar to the situation with, say, Android today.)

And then, there were the places where standardisation hadn't quite worked. Subtle differences between systems often mean that developers had to have a fleet of MSX machines to test on, to be sure. (Again: Android)

And in the midst of all of this, along comes IBM and the rest is history .. but for a while, MSX (and MSX2) were really intriguing technologies. Working on MSX in Japan led me to becoming an ITRON adherent, which led to me becoming a systems/OS developer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

.. which put me in the right place, at the right time, to become an early Linux adopter ..

Your comment reminded me of some amazing photos of a Sony MSX machine: https://mobile.twitter.com/AttractMode/status/11038522081924...

I wish PC makers today would branch out from their "copy Apple" sterility.

Sony had probably the most stylish designs among MSX manufacturers. They were not afraid of using curves compared to e.g. Philips' boxier style.

There was some other interesting stuff in the 80s, like the systems from Apricot (formerly ACT). There was the Portable

http://s11.photobucket.com/user/ballsandy/media/Computer%20r... (uncropped at https://cs9.pikabu.ru/post_img/big/2016/10/15/5/147651790013... )

which also had voice recognition, or the Xen

http://www.1000bit.it/lista/a/act/apricot_xen-i.jpg

which had programmable keys and LCD screen on the keyboard.

Goodness, those Apricot machines are absolutely delightful. I wish there were manufacturers with the balls to try such things again ..

Some of Sony's MSX machines are some of the most beautiful computing devices ever made IMHO.

Oh my goodness, that's incredible.

During the mid-late eighties I had a Yamaha CX5 MII MSX computer which I used as a FM synthesizer along with other instruments. I loved it, but although it was vastly superior in just about everything compared to my old C=64, it ended up being used exclusively as a music making machine as I was anyway in the process of migrating from the C=64 to the Amiga. Still the CX5 was a godsend for music: old FM synths were harder to program compared to old school subtractive synths and being able to edit patches on a computer screen rather on a small display made the process a lot easier than on similarly capable synths or expanders.

Did the Msx have midi ports as standard, or am I remembering incorrectly.

MIDI was added later to the MSX standard, and came after the CX5M, which added them along with the FM module (which was iirc 5 FM operators - the DX7 synth was 7 FM operators) which was the cheaper flavour of FM.

The DX7 was 6 operators, and the module in the CX5M (I had one) was 4 operators, like the DX21. It used the YM2151 sound chip, which was also present in a number of video games.

This was an awesome computer, very fun to play with.

Aha, thank you for jogging me grey matter, I had one as well (got one with a couple of friends and formed a band - one gig wonder). Had a TR707 as well, fun times and great intro into music. Did enjoy the CX5M immensely, though went out of my way to avoid any preset sound. Once you've owned a synth, you just recognise all the presets in all the songs, but was easier back then unlike todays sample world.

I did prefer the bass sounds on the Casio Phase Distortion synths though over the FM options as sounded richer (at least for me).

You might be thinking of the Atari ST, which became popular with musicians for that reason.

Ah, an ATARI ST! As a kid I had always drooled over a 520 ST and 1040 STFM, but they were too expensive and as a Commodore kid I ended up on the Amiga, which turned out to be a blessing in disguise because the Amiga had slightly more powerful hardware and a superior operating system. However the soft spot for the ST always remained and decades later when I can finally afford it, I have a Falcon030 as well. Fascinating machines, the ATARI ST's!

No sure about other brands/models but the Yamaha cx5 was intended as a music workstation from the beginning and did have midi in & out. Those were the days just after Yamaha almost monopolized the music industry with the sound of the DX7 and following synthesizers.

The MSX was the sole reason why I am on IT today.

Picture a 8 year old boy unwrapping his first computer back in 1988. It would boot up right into MSX Basic (until later on when I added a floppy drive). One could play around with commands and have stuff happen. "screen 2" would take you to a graphics mode, where amazed me would get simple programs drawing stuff on the screen. I didn't know that I was 'programming' anything, only that I would type stuff and run and things would happen. I didn't understand what the 'for' instruction did, among others.

My first 'assignment' came from my father. He repaired TVs as a hobby(mostly, he did fix a few for money). One thing he couldn't do was to adjust the alignment on said TVs. There were pattern generator devices which cost quite a lot of money, money we didn't have (even the computer was second-hand).

So young me had set out to draw a greed. Easy - screen 2, then a bunch of 'line' instructions, one per grid line. Lots and lots of typing. Since the computer connected to TVs already (through a RF box), all my father needed to do was load the program (from a K7 tape) and hook up to TVs. That was great.

Revisiting the program a couple of months later (he wanted the grid spacing changed) and dreading to do that work, I was flipping over the manuals, when it suddently clicked: I could use a variable for the 'line' instructions, and change with this 'for' instruction, which so far had eluded me. A few 'pages' worth of code got translated into 4 lines.

I was hooked. Never stopped coding since then.

Another thing I tried to do. So PCs came around, with nice graphics (nicer than what I had, and it took a while but then they got nicer graphics than even MSX 2.0 or the Turbo-R). Then Windows 3.1 came around.

I tried to replicate Windows 3.1 based on magazine printouts - PCs were still hard to come by, PCs with enough specs to run 3.1 even harder still. At that time, I had switched from Basic to Turbo Pascal (3.0). The MSX port was lacking a few units. Most notably, the * graphics * unit (massive omission if you ask me).

So I set out to implement the drawing functions myself. Only I wasn't at the university yet, and didn't know how to draw lines (or god forbid, circles). A quick google search today will give you Bresenham's. Back then, information like that was hard to come by.

So I did some thinking. Even though I was booting up to DOS at this time – which meant that all pages were mapped to RAM – MSX Basic was still there in ROM. How did it do it? The functions must be there somewhere.

I got hold of the "MSX Red Book". That book described all ROM functions, even undocumented ones, with the memory address, input and output registers. Jackpot! Only problem was, as previously mentioned, all memory banks were switched to RAM. I would have to flip two banks to ROM, run the functions, and then switch back.

Then I found a function that did just that, CLPRIM I think it was called. In short order, I had ASM wrappers for most basic drawing functions, and I could draw my "windows".

Two problems remained: text, and the "mouse" (I had no mouse, I was faking with cursor keys).

Drawing text in graphical mode was far beyond my capabilities – specially since I wanted to squeeze 64 columns (ordinarily that computer would do 40 per line, in text mode, and the character patterns were designed for that). Then I remembered that I had WordStar. WordStar managed to get 64 columns. How?

After some digging I found that it would load a program into RAM before running the editor (PC-based DOS users would call these TSR's). So I 'stole' it. Before running my 'windows', I would load it too. Yay windows with titles! (Lots of work done afterward to ensure they would horizontally match and not overflow).

Good, now all that's left was the mouse. So I wrote a 'TSR' of my own, which would draw and move a hardware "sprite". The only thing the turbo pascal program would have to listen would be for the space bar, and then retrieve the 'mouse' position from a pre-arranged memory location. The asssembly code took a while to write - it was easy to lock the machine up - no memory protection or multi-processes meant that these were "hard" lock ups, which required a reset. Still, I eventually got it done.

Last major problem: both the wordstar TSR and mine required some of the same hooks. hooks were pre-determined memory locations. A 'call' – CD 21 – instruction would be issued to these locations whenever the event happened. Usually, they would contain 'C9' (RET). However, there was just enough space for, lets say, a (JMP) instruction (C3) plus memory address. This way, you could run your own code and then (RET) when done. So we both used the same hooks.

The way I got around this was: load the Wordstar one first, then load mine. If I found that there was anything there other than C9, that meant that the hook was in use. So I would save it, put my own in place. When finished, I would transfer control to the code that I had saved before.

Finally I had a working system. A few tweaks here and there – I had to save the current state of the graphics processor (VDP) ports whenever my 'mouse' program activated, otherwise it would corrupt the screen. But then it worked flawlessly, if a bit slow (ROM was much slower to access, something I did not know at the time).

12 year old me used this fancy and overengineered system... mostly as a menu to run games, icons and all. Very little 'serious' work was done.

It's too bad that there was no version control and almost none of the code survived (I may still have some of the 'TSR' code printed out, an earlier version). It would have made for a nice blog post.

I do miss some of that. There were very few abstraction layers between your program and the system, so you really understood what you were doing.

The downside is that I now have a few neurons which are forever locked to store now useless MSX trivia.

poke &HF346,1

call system

> Revisiting the program a couple of months later (he wanted the grid spacing changed) and dreading to do that work, I was flipping over the manuals, when it suddently clicked: I could use a variable for the 'line' instructions, and change with this 'for' instruction, which so far had eluded me. A few 'pages' worth of code got translated into 4 lines.

This exact same eureka moment happened to me as a kid when I picked up BASIC in first or second grade.

I was comparing two numbers to figure out which one is the larger one. I put my if statement, and the condition, but then turned out I had another number I had to compare to the larger of the first two. Once I wrote that, I realized I needed another one, and then another one. It struck me that I didn't even know how many numbers I was going to need to compare and it was clear to me that I cannot continue doing it this way.

I started to think what can I do, what if I compared the first one with the numbers after it in the list... Oh what happens on the last number? Do I wrap, no that doesn't make sense, because I did that comparison already.

I know what to do, I should compare each number with all the numbers after it, and pick the largest one from each iteration and place it elsewhere.

This is how I came up with my O(N^2) sorting implementation. Probably the first "general purpose" algorithm I've ever come up with or implemented but I remember the exact feeling of "wow, this changes things".

That realization that I could execute the same subroutine while changing the parameters it is operating on was literally an eye opener at that age and it was so satisfying having come up with it on my own.

I'm from Istanbul, my father bought me when he retired. Just I want a computer for playing game because my friends have c64 and everyday playing game. When I learned there is limited game option my programming journey started. Yes I'm programmer and 43 year old. I don't have any regret. It is my dream to be a programmer. And MSX was my first friend. It is already working. All hail to my MSX friends.

Same for me, same age, same story about programming because there were very few games, unlike for the C64 which my friends had.

Then my friend enjoy music of knightmare /watch?v=hF0HQYSwcuw

I started on an MSX-1 and then MSX-2 in the early 80s; programming I learned before that in GW-Basic on a luggable [0] and because my parents wanted me to continue (I was just 8), they got an MSX-1 and a year after that an MSX-2. By then I was writing games and wordprocessors (I had some obsession with them at the time) in rancid combinations of MSX-Basic and Z80 asm. It was so fast to iterate that way (provided you were careful with the asm). I wrote enormous monsters of programs in that combi for the MSX-2 and it was always a miracle how they actually worked in the end. Shame I do not have backups. I found a demo of mine on an old MSX-2 BBS backup on a second hand machine I bought, but that was the 'protected' one (Basic source obfuscated and 'hidden' and assembly as bload blob); I have not had the time to figure out what I did there.

After that I moved to programming BBS software in Pascal and C and more games and it slowed down the progress a lot; so slow that compiling process.

It improved a while later with Delphi but after that (C++, Java, C# etc, Haskell, etc) it all went down again; everything is still not really as accessible and fast to iterate as that Basic and Delphi experience. I think it was mainly because they both were a) very fast (interpreted and with Delphi, a very fast, almost instant compiler) and b) for me, closed loop; I had almost no access to other devs (only via BBS's) and that meant I had "The Book" for my environment and that was all there was to learn. So no code completion or spelonking 1000s of libs was needed, just use what you have and you could make anything. Ofcourse you theoretically could make anything; practically you were slow because you had to basically write a lot yourself that you can just pull from the internet now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_Data_Systems

Cliff notes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX

Risky click: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX_Video_access_method (NSFW)

POKE -1,170

Edit: apparently this is done to change the subslot to make sure RAM will be mapped into 0000-7fff. All those words wouldn't have meant much to 12-year-old me, but I certainly knew I had to do that before loading games on my Mitsubishi ML-FX2.

Same on a Philips VG-8020. POKE -1,170 was the magic trick back then :)

I worked for Logo Computer Systems in Montreal from 84 to 94, we did quite a bit of development (of Logo versions) for MSX computers. We had many different models, made for the Japanese market mostly. One day we accidentally static-damaged about ten of them (they weren't made apparently for low-humidity environments). We had to have a bunch of the custom chips airlifted in. I spent a week with my boss and a scope trying to get them working. We managed to fix about six of them. I learned a lot about hardware that week. Fun times.

Guys, this is a presentation from Paulo Peccin (WebMSX creator) - in pt_BR but you can turn on subtitles auto-translation . I was there, it was great =)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVFL05xsdhk - part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISPb1sL72EQ - part 2

I had one, and out of nostalgia I created a virtual disk drive using an arduino (http://codinglab.blogspot.com/2013/01/virtual-msx-disk-drive...) All my friends had disk drives and I was stuck with the frustrating tape, so creating a virtual disk drive kind of made for it. The games though sucked.

I still hold my MSX dear, protected in a box for future generations. That's how I learned to program, fiddle with memory addresses, and weld broken circuits. 3.5MHz could do a lot, well, sort of, games were pretty cool :-)

Past the mid eighties, any personal computer platform not using the 68000 family of processor was just doomed.

In hindsight, x86 (which was a shittier ISA) survived, but it shouldn't have been.

So did ARM

Meant to restrict that to CISC ISAs.

If we include RISC ISAs, what's surprising is that we're still dealing with CISC today. I'm hoping RISC-V will change that.

As someone who is personally obsessed about 1960s and onwards computing I found this to be a great a well researched article. I always considered MSX and CP/M to be the real parents of the Windows monopoly. I view MSX as the learning process for Microsoft, and CP/M as the building blocks, since the first version of Windows (called DOS at the time) was API compatible with CP/M

The MSX computers even had CP/M. At least Spectravideo was distributed both with CP/M and MSX-DOS. The MSX-DOS was weird, I think it must have been the only 8-bit version of DOS Microsoft made?

Edit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX-DOS lots of nice anecdotes there.

Whoa! That's crazy. I did not even know about MSX DOS! Thanks!

How is DOS the first version of windows? Just because it was made by the same company? It would be less inaccurate (but still wrong) to say the Mac OS was the first version of windows :/

You are right, as from a design perspective, Windows was based on Mac OS. What I meant was that the first versions of Windows were built on DOS:

https://www.quora.com/Is-Windows-still-based-on-DOS

I quite like the idea of DOS being the first version of Windows. In the beginning, there was just a command line. Then Windows was added as a graphical interface. Then the graphical interface became pre-eminent and the command line became an obscure feature to most users. Windows code was originally tied to DOS but over time first completely incorporated it, then recast it as Windows changed from the child to the parent in the relationship.

Yes, this is what I meant, you said it better than I did. As graphical features were added to DOS then it was rebranded as Windows by Microsoft. I guess at some point Microsoft realised that they had to have two distinct sets of code and that they needed to be different products for branding and legal reasons related to OS/2 and IBM. I guess it could have ended up being called DOS Windows or DOS Gui or something, but Windows was a much better name...

The MSX was also my first computer. I wrote my first lines of code in Basic copying small games from magazines as a 6 year old kid in the 80s.

We had a HIT BIT Sony MSX.

Same here. Mine had 16k of memory (12k usable).

Completely derailed my career. Wrote a ZX-Spectrum game and refused to port it to MSX. The pay for the ZX game was a compiler so I doubt much would have come of it anyway.

nice! which game did you write? And also why did you refused to port it to the MSX?

Heya, you're marked as [dead] on newer posts - might want to hit up the mods

I think we also forget about how common Microsoft BASIC was.

In the late 1970's the hobby market existed with machines then being many and diverse. Almost all of them licensed Microsoft Basic. Only later with the home market and the likes of Commodore, Sinclair et al. did home computers come with their own versions of BASIC.

We all know that BASIC is a load of rubbish. But the MicroSoft BASIC on those hobby machines set the mood for what home computers would have, even if it was not MicroSoft's BASIC.

Early home computers did have custom ROMs for all kinds of exciting languages, on the BBC Micro you could get BCPL (C, early version), Forth and probably Pascal. Same on the Sinclair machines, there was even a ZX81 clone - the Jupiter Ace - that ran Forth.

Despite this plethora of languages we ended up with BASIC. Boring BASIC. There were no resource excuses, Microsoft had just set the tone of what the home computer market was to be.

Same problem happened with Windows. Instead of networked UNIX style computers with some security worked out with things like 'user space' there were this ugly DOS and Windows things and it was 'personal computing' with people carrying disks from one PC in the office to another. Although I liked Windows at the time it really was the second time round that Microsoft had stunted computing, first with BASIC and second time with Windows/DOS.

Coming from a BBC Micro background where the BASIC was awesome and the disk filing system was okayish I was massively underwhelmed when I first had to use DOS. I felt 'is this all there is' as I experienced the kludginess of it.

MSX made precisely zero impact in the UK other than giving the likes of Personal Computer World something to waste dead tree and ink about. From what I remember it was not that hacker friendly as back then you needed to write code that was familiar with the hardware, not abstracted out through some convenient operating system. With a BBC micro you knew that you could write something performant - as in arcade machine grade - with the built in assembler and a lot of work with the A/Y/X registers of the 6502. MSX on a 16 register Z80 with some mystery meat video interface made that possibility unattainable.

All considered I think MSX hampered the computer cause, promising something that was never delivered. It was also off in that blind alley of BASIC that MicroSoft foisted on the hobby market a decade earlier.

> We all know that BASIC is a load of rubbish.

I don't think this is right - BASIC was quite well designed considering these machines' capabilities and projected use. The model of a BASIC-powered home computer was essentially that of a programmable calculator with "computer" features tacked on. You could start by PRINT-ing math expressions at the REPL, and these would give you the sort of result you would expect, using software floats. Then you could make more complex programs, using simple line numbers, variables, and a handful of reserved words like PRINT/?, INPUT, IF, GOTO, FOR. You also had PEEK, POKE, SYS and/or USR to access the hardware directly. Sure, in theory FORTH might have been more elegant, but its RPN-like approach was far from intuitive.

I recently experimented with Living Computer Museum's CDC 6500. It has Basic available, and it's remarkable how similar it is to C64 Basic.

In fact, if you have experience with the C64 you can use the CDC without any documentation.

I wrote some basic for the first time in like 25 years. Forgot how there were no local variables nor parameters to functions. Everything is a global variable and GOSUB is just GOTO with a return stack (no parameters). Also forgot depending on the BASIC that some BASICs only allowed 2 letter variables.

Those were my biggest issues trying to get back into it.

    Also forgot depending on the BASIC that some BASICs only allowed 2 letter variables.

For those not familiar with these systems, the way you coped was usually by keeping a "data dictionary" on a sheet of paper.

On a sheet of paper you'd have...

    $AA = Name of foo
    $AB = Selected color of baz
    $AC = Blah blah 
    $AD = Length of qux

etc.

It wasn't TOO bad. Until you lost the damn thing, or had to work on somebody else's code and you didn't have the data dictionary. You could keep the data dictionary in the code's comments, but on systems with just a few kilobytes of RAM (ie, the systems that restricted you to 2-char identifiers) this was not always a feasible luxury.

Luckily, I managed not to have to deal with this personally. All the BASIC environments I used as a kid in the 80s did not have this limitation. But I heard horror stories.

Couldn't you pop those in REM statements (assuming you had RAM to burn)?

Yes, but the systems with two-char identifiers were also the ones with the most extreme RAM restrictions.

Some commercial Apple II software was actually written in BASIC, and you could read the code. It was usually fairly liberally commented. Example code in magazines was liberally commented as well. Folks didn't seem to comment individual lines of code, but tended to "name" and sometimes describe their GOSUB (subroutine) blocks.

But, Applesoft basic didn't force you to use two character variable names. Because most Apple II's on the market had a luxurious 64KB or 128KB of RAM, and none had less than 48KB.

I think it was a different story on systems with 4KB or perhaps 16KB of RAM. On those systems I bet you were often squeezing out every byte.

I also think some older languages (COBOL?) often had restrictions like this.

Yeah there are a lot of limitations, and to make it more fun the limitations were different across computers at the time.

I wrote a simple BASIC interpreter recently in golang, and I'm amazed I had the patience to write "large" programs in BASIC in my youth with the limitations that were present.

> I'm amazed I had the patience to write "large" programs in BASIC in my youth with the limitations that were present.

what else did you have to do with your time? :)

i've had similar thoughts, but looking back, outside of gaming, the entire use of the computer, for me, was keying in programs. some were from others (in magazines/books), and some were learning to write my own. for the first few years of having one, i had no bbs connections, so... there was really nothing else to do except read books/magazines and type in programs.

I guess that's true! I switched from writing in BASIC to writing in Z80 assembly after a year or two - though it has to be said that I "compiled" my program by hand, referring to the opcode table(s) at the back of the manual.

My resulting programs tended to look like this:

    10 FOR N=60000 TO 60000 + 20
    20   READ A
    30   POKE N,A
    40 NEXT N
    50 RANDOMIZE USR 60000
   100 DATA 1,2,3,4,5,....

As you can imagine it was a tedious process. Most of my time was really spent trying to hack games for extra-lives, which I guess wasn't so unusual back in the day. Later I used the same skills to patch binaries to accept serial numbers - before I started writing real code in C, Java, Perl, etc, etc.

A lot of custom business software for the IBM PC was written in BASIC and it worked very well.

I helped a restaurant that had their inventory, crew scheduling, payroll, and accounting all written in BASIC. Ran on a PC AT in the back office. It worked flawlessly.

BASIC on those systems was rubbish, every platform had its own dialect, some like Commodore BASIC 2.0 didn't provide full support for hardware capabilities, the systems shipped without a compiler. As a consequence, when you got your first computer you learned the bare minimum through BASIC and then quickly moved on to assembler in order to get the efficiency and be able to make the hardware do something useful.

Many of us have fond memories if BASIC, but let's face it, it was, well, quite basic (pun intended).

Actually the core of all those early systems was Microsoft Basic even the original IBM PC had a Basic in ROM.

If you wanted low-level access you just poked Assembly code

Most of the really early Home Pc's had such limited hardware that running a compiler was not practical - you could get compilers for CPM systems but they where more professional systems with a price tag to match.

Even than a top of the line Cromecho s100 was a lot cheaper than say a pdp11/03

BASIC has a very inconsistent syntax, and did so from the very first version. Over time it got worse.

For a specific example, just look at the syntax for drawing primitives like PSET, LINE or CIRCLE. Something like this is neither particularly discoverable, nor consistent with the normal function call syntax in the language:

   LINE (0, 0) - (100, 100), 2, FB

(I wonder how many people with BASIC experience from that era remember what "FB" means here.)

BF fills the box, and does something wierd with the x1, y1, and x2, y2 coords.

I'm not persuaded by "discoverable"; you'd get a book that included a page for every statement with a worked example.

You have to know where to start looking though, and it's not at all obvious that LINE is what you need to draw a filled rectangle.

It also throws you off once you learn about subprograms (in dialects that had them), and realize that all this stuff is almost but not quite like them - and all the differences are there for no good reason.

The debate existed then, I quote Dijkstra:

"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."

I never got to own a Jupiter Ace or to have a go at FORTH. I don't think the options were 'BASIC or FORTH', neither do I think that computers had to have 4K of ROM and 1K of RAM by the time the 8 bit microprocessors came along in the hobby era. Sure 8K of anything cost more than a paltry 4K but were those machines with 4K ROM of BASIC and 1K of RAM useful for anything whatsoever?

The ZX81 with 1K just mentally mutilated programmers, other than that you learned that you needed more memory.

Your first programming language constrains how you think, I was deeply wedded to the 'GOTO' concept and could not understand how a program could work without line numbers. BASIC took me a long way off the object-oriented paradigm!

Anyway, thanks for grumbling about my sweeping statement - that I still stand by - I have now found some Dijkstra that is totally relevant to today and how web development has gone:

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF

    Your first programming language constrains how you 
    think, I was deeply wedded to the 'GOTO' concept 
    and could not understand how a program could work 
    without line numbers. BASIC took me a long way off 
    the object-oriented paradigm!

Maybe! This wasn't the case for me. I'm no genius programmer, but going from BASIC to Pascal was very, very natural for me and it was a welcome change because even as a high schooler it was obvious that BASIC programs quickly became unmanageable.

Recently though I have struggled a bit in my brief encounters with functional languages, though, thanks to so many years of OO. But I got the sense that if I spent some time with it, I'd get it.

The first programming language I learned was Microsoft BASIC on an MSX. I then moved on to learn Z80 assembler, Pascal, X86 assembler, C, Scheme, Java, Python, Haskell, Standard ML, Objective C, Rust, and whatnot. I believe I'm a pretty good programmer.

Claiming that learning BASIC as the first language somehow permanently broke they way I think about programming is bullshit.

He was really just having a dig at some colleagues, it wasn't meant as a serious proposition. In any case he's not talking about productive practical programming.

I learned the ropes on BASIC in the 80s as well and it was a fine introduction to programming as a practical task but e.g. is in no way any kind of preparation to understand theoretical computer science topics like algorithm verification and provably correct programs. They're different worlds and that's really all he was saying. He'd get students come into his classes who thought they already knew all about programming and hit a brick wall when they had to deal with the level of analytical rigour his classes required.

I hit this problem myself when I try to learn functional programming. I've had a go at Haskell a few times and got nowhere. I had a similar problem getting my head around object oriented programming. Switching theoretical domains can be a significant issue.

In the UK an entire generation of professional developers started with BASIC on toy machines like the Spectrum, before moving on to professional languages, often after a degree.

Calling it bullshit is actually being far too polite about it.

Not to be negative but I would mention "a bad workman blames their tools ".

To be fair, all good craftsmen care a lot about their tools. But gatekeeping other people based on the tools they use rather then the results they achieve is just snobbishness.

> Your first programming language constrains how you think

I call bullshit on that. A whole generation of programmers started with BASIC and went on to different languages. I went from BASIC to Pascal and had no problem at all going from GOTO to structured programming, but I did miss the REPL of BASIC.

Btw. if BASIC cripples your mind, then so would Assembler, which is presumably how how Dijkstras generation got their start.

Honestly I think it was just snobbishness. BASIC was available on cheep microcomputers which was affordable for regular people and hobbyists, as opposed to the machines and languages only available for businesses and academics.

Obviosly Dijkstra didn't see the benefit of a REPL, since be believe that you should sit down an prove the correctness of software by hand before you were allowed to execute it.

In his day that made sense - you might have to submit your program to a batch queue with long > 1 day turnaround.

Or you could develop interactively using a language with a REPL like BASIC. Which Dijkstra was railing against.

Not always my first BASIC programs where written on coding sheets and we got the results a week later :-)

Yeah, it is like compiling a Rust program today, on a mediocre machine - 1 day turnaround.

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