Remember the ZX80
Comment from E-mail
I do have a question for you…Do you remember a Brit by the name of Sir Clive Sinclair. If so, what is your take on Sinclair computers. I always thought of “Uncle Clive” as a British version of you. Unfortunately, he didn’t have a Steve Jobs to brilliantly market his products. (Just to spur memories, the ZX80 (a Z80A microprocessor-based, membrane-keyboard, 1K RAM computer, black, about 5″ by 5″ by 1″) and the QL (released about 6 mos. after the Mac (had a Motorola 68008 processor, 128K RAM and to microcassette drives built in). As I remember it, it was the first computer to significantly improve upon your BASIC, only 10 years later…
Woz
Sinclaire kept coming out with very inexpensive, great, products. Many of them I bought. I think that he did have some marketing, if not the longest life products. I even bought a ZX80, and later the Timex version.
My own BASIC was the hardest task of developing the Apple I and ][ computers. I’d never studied compiler/interpreter writing and had only practiced my ideas on paper before. I’d read some good books on the subject. I’d never programmed in BASIC before the Apple I. I just sniffed the air and decided that the games that would drive personal computers were written in BASIC. I picked up a manual at Hewlett Packard and used their variant of BASIC as my model. Either they had good substring syntax or I evolved my own based on theirs, but I much preferred it to the DEC style that Microsoft went with, using LEFT$ and MID$ and RIGHT$ functions. I laid out my syntax charts and made a decision to take floating point out so that I could finish slightly sooner and have the first BASIC for the 6502 processor ever. I mainly wanted it to be able to play games. Then I knew it was good enough for whatever else. I also wanted to program solutions to my Hewlett Packard engineering problems. That’s where I worked as an engineer designing calculators.
I could go on. The BASIC turned out extremely modular, so I could easily add something by adding some syntax descriptions in near-text form, and write routines for the new functions or ops that were needed. The language didn’t have to be rewritten.