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It's a shame that compilers were so expensive during the eight bit era. The built in Basic in most home computers of the era gave many a good start on learning
by Mountain_Skies 7y ago
It's a shame that compilers were so expensive during the eight bit era. The built in Basic in most home computers of the era gave many a good start on learning programming but it was a huge step up in commitment when you wanted to go beyond Basic.
- stevekemp 7y agoI guess I was lucky in the the computer I started with, the ZX Spectrum, had a pretty decent manual. Which also managed to cover assembly language. So my route to coding was first of all BASIC, then assembly language. At the time I was 11-12 years old and it didn't seem like a huge jump, though I guess I can see it was now! I think my learning went BASIC -> Assembly, on the z80. Then later QBASIC on the PC to assembly, edited with debug.com, and after that I started doing "real" programming with C, Perl and all the other languages that followed. I'm still sad that most people don't have any built-in programming environment to their computers that is so easy to start with these days. I guess javascript is close, since everybody has a browser. But it's not quite the same.
- pjmlp 7y agoThere were plenty of them available as type-in from books and magazines, and 8 bit scene already had quite a few public domain tape/floppy exchange going on over snail mail. And in many countries piracy was anyway rampant, so if one really wanted them, it wasn't a big issue to find a shop selling copied tapes, with copied manuals and stuff. The biggest issue was fitting everything into 64KB, or switching tape/floppies all the time.