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> compared to its contemporaries It didn't have any. That's why it thrived. It was the first cross-platform OS for microcomputers. There were other microcomput
by lproven 4y ago
> compared to its contemporaries
It didn't have any. That's why it thrived. It was the first cross-platform OS for microcomputers. There were other microcomputers, but they didn't have OSes as such: they mostly had a BASIC interpreter in ROM and that was all.
And most machines had their own unique implementations of BASIC, all subtly different. In the American market (and only there), Microsoft BASIC was a lowest-common-denominator industry standard, because it was very small and MS made it cheap. It was rubbish, though: no graphics, no sound, no structure, not even IF...THEN...ELSE.
In the rest of the world, vendors competed for who could offer the best BASIC... and in the end, Acorn won, with BBC BASIC, which was the best by far of any early 1980s micro. Acorn went on to invent the ARM processor.
However, all the different BASICs made all the machines software incompatible.
CP/M was a DOS: a disk operating system. You needed a disk drive, and ideally 2. That was expensive, so CP/M ran on expensive micros in the small-business market: often they cost thousands of £/$ while home computers sold for hundreds of £/$.
In that space, CP/M had no competition until MS-DOS came along, for the newer and more powerful 16-bit Intel 8088 and 8086 chips.
- goosedragons 4y agoIf the UK is "the rest of the world" sure. Microsoft BASICs served as the foundation for a lot of home computer BASICs, Commodore's, Apple's, MSX, PC-8800's. C64's were very popular in parts of Europe too like Germany, not just the US.
- lproven 4y agoNot just the UK. France had some interesting home micros, and of course Minitel. Japan had some amazing machines, and MSX did some stuff that no other 8-bits ever did. Behind the iron curtain there was a ton of R&D, including legions of clones, but also PDP-11 home computers, machines that used trinary instead of binary and all sorts of exotica. In the Southern hemisphere, Australia and several big Latin American countries had their own industries, due to the costs of imports.
- goosedragons 4y agoI'm aware but they weren't using BBC Basic... MSX Basic was a derivative of MS BASIC, which isn't really surprising since they had their hand in developing the MSX standard.
- lproven 4y agoMSX wasn't? No, indeed not, and AFAICR MSX BASIC wasn't anything very special. (MSX-DOS actually was, and is CP/M compatible and can run CP/M programs, which is rarely even mentioned.) But MSX was aimed squarely at gaming with a sideline in music making and things. I feel it deserves more respect, as one of the longest-surviving 8-bit architectures, one that was the most extended of all of them, and even transitioned with some degree of success to 16-bit, with the Z800-compatible R800 chip: https://www.msx.org/wiki/ASCII_DAR800-X0G https://www.msx.org/wiki/ASCII_DAR800-X0G