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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

Is it similar to the Maximite series of hardware and their Basic clones? I think a fast Basic on its dedicated hardware is quite a phenomenal way to teach kids and novices programming. I wish one of these setups would penetrate into the school systems and become a standard teaching platform in a way that the BBC Micro turned out in the UK.

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Huh, I didn't know about Maximite, and reading their intro to the Colour Maximite 2 at https://geoffg.net/maximite.html... well, I feel like I read their minds years later and I'm trying to recreate the same thing.

One difference I can sense is in the interpreter. In the case of the EndBOX, I'm creating a computer to run EndBASIC on, but EndBASIC has already existed for 5 years and is multiplatform: you can write a program and have it run in your browser via WASM, in the desktop version of the interpreter, or now in this new small form factor format. In the case of Micromite, it sounds like MMBasic is specifically designed for this machine.

Which brings me to something I have been thinking about recently: I think BASIC is the least interesting aspect to the EndBOX and the thing that might hurt the concept the most (because BASIC is old, limited, legacy, who cares about it, blah blah blah). I'm starting to think that the more interesting parts of this project are what I have built to take a Rust app that uses some APIs to talk to a "generic graphical console" or to "the hardware", and have that exact same app run on the web, on the desktop, and now natively on a small computer. And for the later case, I think the pipeline I developed to take the app and generate a full SD card disk image with a trivial command to run it in a standalone manner is interesting too. Stay tuned for a follow up blog post as I elaborate on these ideas...

One difference that may be very important to a lot of people is that unfortunately the MMBasic is not open source. Is yours closed or open source?

EndBASIC (the desktop version) is open source and I plan to keep it that way. I wouldn't want you to be "locked out" of any code you write in EndBASIC.

However, I'm not planning on open-sourcing what goes into packaging it for the EndBOX (the bindings for NetBSD and the release building scripts) because that's very specific to this project and I see no benefit in publishing them.

> Is it similar to the Maximite series of hardware and their Basic clones?

The Maximite series had cousins, but it also evolved into the Picomite:

https://geoffg.net/picomite.html

Some of the cousins:

The BASIC*Engine:

https://basicengine.org/esp8266.html

As discussed here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17674944

Followed later by the BASIC Engine Next Gen:

https://basicengine.org/nextgen.html

And more recently BASIC Engine RX:

https://basicengine.org/#_what_is_the_basic_engine_rx