> It democratized programming
Yawn. Everything “democratizes” everything these days.
Yawn. Everything “democratizes” everything these days.
You could have that BASIC experience on a minicomputer like the PDP-8, 11, or 20 which you might have at a high school or college earlier but with microcomputers you could have it in elementary school or at home.
[1] https://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=bitstory-article-2/breako...
[2] http://blog.hardcoregaming101.net/2012/09/basic-history-of-b...
Before we got our home computer, the closest I ever got to a computer was reading about them in the encyclopedia.
What Stallman did a decade later was great if you happened to have access to the type of computer that could run Emacs. Even then, you probably didn't own the machine and maybe even had to pay for time on it by the hour. The small machines that ran Microsoft Basic were in people's homes.
No, a decade later was at the end of the 1980's. At that time, many middle class families could afford home computers like the Atari ST, which could run many of the GNU compilers/tools.
It was a great learning experience porting Unix apps and games to the ST.
You might be thinking of basic Motorola 68000 support which GNU C did have in the late 80’s but you couldn’t build a set of GNU tools that ran on the ST with it.
My point was more that the 68K home computers like Atari ST and the Amiga of the mid-to-late 1980s were powerful enough to "run emacs / C compilers", even if it wasn't the GNU stuff yet.
Like when awaiting pizza delivery, "they're here in 10 mins" doesn't directly relate to a specific guy
Could be wrong though
And no, to answer your question