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I recently got gifted an old Commodore PET. It boots straight into BASIC, so anything you type can be a command or a program, but what’s even cooler is the way
by micheljansen 8y ago
I recently got gifted an old Commodore PET. It boots straight into BASIC, so anything you type can be a command or a program, but what’s even cooler is the way the console (they call it “monitor”) works. If you press “up”, rather than scrolling through past commands one by one like in Bash, DOS etc. the cursor simply goes up the screen. You can modify anything you see and hit return to commit. This can be a previous command, a line of code or even the contents of the system’s memory (!).
It’s a really interesting form of direct manipulation that I have only ever seen matched by “document” style interfaces like Matlab, R etc.
If anyone is interested, I’ll do a write up later with some videos or something.
- GlenTheMachine 8y agoIIRC all Commodore machines did this. The C64 did. That's how you edited a program: you LIST'ed it, and then scrolled up and changed the lines on the screen. When you hit ENTER the new line overwrote the original one. The C64 did not have any way to directly show or edit system memory, though. That's cool.
- dsnuh 8y agoAre you forgetting about POKE and PEEK?
- GlenTheMachine 8y agoNo. But an actual monitor was a much easier way to directly access system memory.
- micheljansen 8y agoThe C64 was indeed one of the only Commodore machines that did not ship with a Machine Language Monitor. You could however install one: https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor https://www.c64-wiki.com/wiki/Machine_Code_Monitor
- GlenTheMachine 8y agoSure. I even wrote my own, as an exercise in learning 6510 assembly.
- yiyus 8y agoYou may like Acme: https://research.swtch.com/acme https://research.swtch.com/acme
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- sandinmyjoints 8y agoEmacs’ Dired mode lets you interact with the file system this way. Imagine the output of ‘ls -l’ as an editable document — seeing this in action was one of the killer features that made me an Emacs user.
- slrz 8y agoWhat's an Emacs? Running that command just seems to reduce my disk quota. The functionality you're describing sounds pretty much like vidir (from moreutils[1]), though. [1] https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/ https://joeyh.name/code/moreutils/
- emptysea 8y agoRanger is a similar application that I don’t use enough. http://ranger.github.io http://ranger.github.io
- TeMPOraL 8y ago> What's an Emacs? Running that command just seems to reduce my disk quota. It's an operating system that offer the sanest capabilities for productive work with everything that's primarily textual, or could be made to be primarily textual.
- jhayward 8y agovidir is a low-fidelity imitation of Emacs dired mode. Emacs has had dired since at least the 80's.
- digi_owl 8y agoFunny thing is that this sounds similar to what was Raskin's big idea for computer interaction.
- micheljansen 8y agoAnd many years later, Bret Victor
- WhatIsDukkha 8y agoI used to love this on my Apple 2. It exists nowadays as Emacs in the built in eshell. The buffer is the shell is the buffer.