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There existed a huge number of home computer models, and they all had a tiny portion of the market, and many countries had their own little brand. But what mos
by teddyh 4y ago
There existed a huge number of home computer models, and they all had a tiny portion of the market, and many countries had their own little brand. But what most people used, especially in the mid-1980s, was predominantly Commodore 64s, from what I remember. In the late 1980s and early 1990s it was Amigas and Atari ST’s for a while, and then IBM-compatible PCs took over.
But even if I remember that incorrectly, how large a part of users had a computer with a sensible version of BASIC? I submit that it was vanishingly small; possibly only the UK had any large user base of computers with a reasonable version of BASIC. For most other people, BASIC did not have functions. And therefore, following the lowest common denominator, neither did program listings in magazines, etc.
- lproven 4y agoI disagree, but it seems that mere evidence isn't going to sway you, so I doubt anything will. Basically every home computer had a better BASIC than the C64, including GW-BASIC, and most people I knew personally didn't use C64s. It was built as a games machine and nothing else, with a poor BASIC, poor, slow, low-capacity and very expensive floppy disk drives. And the machine was expensive too in the early days. Maybe your family and your friends' families were rich. Mine weren't. We couldn't afford £500 American toys. We had sub-£200 machines, with better BASICs, and we loved the things. Kids of rich British families had BBC Micros and looked down on us.