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BBC BASIC was also fast. A lot of the "Better" BASICs were also quite a bit slower at the time.

Microsoft BASIC was relatively swift compared to most early peers, had decent precision FP, and had limited interoperability between platforms. This made it ideal for small business, education, and magazine listings.

So once again Microsoft won with an inferior product by turning it into a de facto standard :-)

I did like the simplicity of it.

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Lovely thing about the BBC was the I/o breakout that meant you could easily wire it up to another processor and do stuff. For those of us at the time, growing up with alternative systems, such features were a real wonder, and a reason to lug everything over to my BBC-owning neighbours place for a weekend hacking ..

I love it that this ethos has persisted in the ZX Spectrum Next design[1], which also allows for the .. limited .. 8-bit (well, max'ed out actually) machine to access a .. rather large super-computer, by comparison, and by that I mean a raspberry-pi Zero ...

I wonder, if ZX Next is a paradigm which develops further into a viable market (imho, this already exists, elsewhere and otherwise..) then what sort of crazy machines might we be sporting on our wrists and in pockets, soon enough?

I mean, ZX Next ideology, in a PDA ..

[1] - https://www.specnext.com

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