I have a testimonial to offer as a member of the generation who really did grow up using 8-bit micros and Microsoft BASIC... At 2024-11-17T17:17:35-0500, Clem Cole wrote: [...] Yes. I think Wozniak's Apple I made an excellent choice by booting into a monitor, not a specific language interpreter. Microsoft of course did not make that decision. They had a BASIC, and "the only thing that matters in this business is volume", as Gates has been quoted saying, so it was to their advantage to funnel all micro users down a cattle run if they could. And they did. And so did Apple, later. This was true of Forth, too. I knew of its existence (and Pascal, and COBOL) when I was a kid, thanks to magazines like _80 Microcomputing_, but didn't get to experiment with it in person until GNU Forth (also I had a chance to play with a Canon Cat for a time--that was pretty neat). When I learned that micro BASICs all threw out Dartmouth's MAT operators, I was pretty annoyed. Even with a rudimentary exposure to matrix algebra in high school I could tell that they were the sort of computational application that screamed for automation by computer. Unless the machine sat in the corner of the room as a toy and was operated only by people who didn't write (or even modify) programs in the first place, and had zero curiosity about programming, I think the prevalence of the "forever corrupted by BASIC" specimen is overstated by several orders of magnitude. It was impossible to operate a TRS-80, an Apple, or a Commodore without being aware of alternatives to BASIC as a programming language-- foremost, the availability of machine language. The hobbyist magazines, like the aforementioned 80 Micro, the _Rainbow_ for a Moto 6809-based machine (nothing to do with the DEC product), and even Radio Shack's own "Microcomputer News" monthly, which absolutely was dedicated to flogging only products they sold from their own stores, ran features or columns on machine/assembly language programming in practically every issue. (The last went so far as to run a series presenting the architecture and some of the organization of the Sharp PC-1500/TRS-80 PC-2 "pocket computer". I would attach it for the list's amusement, but the PDF is too big. The author was Bruce Elliott.) ML was inescapable. It was blindingly faster than BASIC and necessary to program certain features of the hardware that Microsoft or its licensees didn't get around to abstracting in the language. Considering games, collections like David Ahl's were largely portable to help protect sales, and limited to Teletype-like interaction because that's often the environment whence they originated. But there were hardly any commercial game programs for the micros that _didn't_ poke into RAM for device configuration, contrive to poke ML subroutines for speed or obfuscation, or were just outright written in ML. To be unaware of alternatives to BASIC on an 8-bit macro was to achieve a miraculous feat of ignorance. Granted, I'm sure we've all met at least one programmer in our lives who fit that description. But a familiarity with BASIC likely wasn't their problem. An even halfway serious 8-bit micro user was never unaware of the underlying ISA. William Barden, Jr. wrote multiple bestselling books on assembly language programming, and he had competition. To not even be tempted to go to the "bare metal" on these machines would be a feat of self-restraint that would tax even the sternest ascetic. Alternatives to Microsoft's dialect of BASIC were known and sold, sometimes bundled with alternatives to the vendor's OS. Frequently these had better feature sets and/or higher performance than MS BASIC. They had to, to survive at all in the market. Microware's BASIC-09, a really disciplined dialect for the time that I feel pushed BASIC in the direction of Pascal as far as it could, was an eye-opener to me and prepared me well to encounter Pascal and C for real. And again, thanks to hobbyist magazines and culture I knew of the existence of those alternatives long before I got to experiment with them. One of the nice features about the M6809-based Color Computer 2, was that it shipped enough RAM chips for the entire address space along with its ROM. That meant that while part of the reset sequence copied the ROM into RAM, you could then get rid of it, replacing it with something else (usually an OS). You could then enjoy a BASIC-free, or even Microsoft-free, runtime environment. Again, the "(MS) BASIC is the only way" cohort must comprise (a) mythical beings, (b) mindless Microsoft boosters, and (c) the supremely incurious. I think the trope of maligning BASIC is more about maligning people, hence the emphasis on programmers supposedly being irreversibly brain damaged by having acquired competence in the language. Some people love to construct hierarchies and pecking orders, and often the person with the most prescriptions for who shall get pecked, and why, has a startlingly unimpressive beak for programming. Relatively few of us would go back to a Unix that would fit into a PDP-11/45 as a daily driver, either. ;-) At the risk of getting back on topic, I reviewed Kemeny & Kurtz's _Back to BASIC_ 15 years ago. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2140350.Back_to_BASIC?from_search=true&… Regards, Branden