New answers tagged commodore
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In the late seventies / early eighties my school in Bochum (North Rhine-Westphalia) first had a Wang 2200 BASIC computer that was both used for local basic programming and as a terminal to the communal data center (I didn't get to use that, though.) Later they installed two Apple II machines with UCSD Pascal.
The school was part of a school trial project to ...
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It’s available directly from the publisher (the author’s own publishing company), including in electronic format (e-pub and Mobi).
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In 1983 my school in Hamburg purchased one expensive Commodore PET programmable in BASIC and i never saw any use in that.
In 1985 my school in Bargteheide filled an entire classroom with Commodore C128s programmable in COMAL and let us students code on them and let us students teach a course to other students.
Me and my hacker friends however preferred the ...
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In the late 80's we had Apple IIs for 6502 assembler and those slightly incompatible Wang DOS machines with amber monitors for Turbo Pascal and SPS programming. That was at some sort of high school with engineering focus in northern West Germany.
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Two data points from North Rhine-Westphalia: About 1980 our small Gymnasium had a demo setup of original IBM PCs (with CGA/EGA graphics?) for some weeks, but then settled for a bunch of Apple II clones, maybe 16 devices.
A neighboring Gymnasium had a Dietz minicomputer with four user terminals (plus one management terminal) at the same time, for several ...
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Which brand was most commonly used in West German schools? I know Commodore was big in Germany, which would make it a likely candidate, unless nationalistic pressure acted again?
There is no simple answer. Not so much due to any 'nationalistic pressure' (*1) but the fact that German schools are not run according to federal guidelines, but are managed on ...
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There wasn't any master plan. Each school did its own thing, depending on the commitment of their teachers (or the lack thereof).
Our school in Rendsburg/S-H got a few (5?) Sharp MZ-80K in 1981?, one MZ-80A a bit later (which featured an actually usable keyboard!) for programming in BASIC and Pascal.
The MZs were followed by two Commodore PC-10 around 1985 ...
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I can only speak for my own school, a Roman Catholic Gymnasium (i.e. highest-of-three-tiers secondary school, the word does not mean "gym" in German) in a small town near the former West German capital Bonn. But as far as I heard from others, this was sort of typical.
We had one Commodore PET-2001 which the school got soon after it was available in the late ...
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'Jeff Porter realized it would not be possible to significantly cost
reduce the Amiga 500 to get it into the $250 retail price range'.
They could have cost-reduced the A500 - perhaps even to $250 retail - but they would have had to make some compromises that (thankfully) they weren't willing to do.
There were a lot of chips on the board. They needed ...
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Commodore obtained an infusion of cash from Gould, which Tramiel used beginning in 1976 to purchase several second-source chip suppliers, including MOS Technology, Inc., in order to assure his supply.[6] He agreed to buy MOS, which was having troubles of its own, only on the condition that its chip designer Chuck Peddle join Commodore directly as head of ...
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Intel very likely did this with surplus batches of ROM-equipped microcontrollers - eg if you look closely at the pinout of the 8031 vs 8051/8751, an 8051 wired up like an 8031 WILL behave as an 8031 no matter what is in the ROM/EPROM.
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They did, with the A600. But in true late-stage Commodore fashion, they screwed it up and made it more expensive.
To cost-reduce an A500, you'd have to reproduce its spec on simpler silicon. The market wasn't interested in an 8 MHz 68000 in 1991/92: the PC had stolen all of the Amiga's thunder at commodity prices. The Amiga's niche silicon was just too ...
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Even Cassette Basic offered many features not present in the 6502 dialects, including the ability to use long variable names, support for both single and double-precision floating point, support for both 16-bit and 32-bit integer types, support for hex and octal numbers, and many other features.
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[Maury Markowitz' answer already nails it, so this is just to add some numbers for comparison]
The Cassette BASIC 1.0/1.1 in the IBM PC ROM is a Microsoft BASIC V5.x (*1). It's usually marketed as MBASIC. It was available as stand alone application or as program under CP/M and other OS. MS offered 3 basic flavours:
8 KiB BASIC
Extended BASIC
Disk BASIC
8 ...
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The amazing little AtariLab was actually ported to the C64. This included pretty complete I/O, although it was mostly used for input. I'm not sure how many, if any, actually shipped.
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The early versions of Microsoft BASIC required 4KB of ROM
The 4k versions lacked a number of major features, including string variables. These were added in the 8k versions. The equivalent 6502 version, which also expanded the floating point from 32 to 40 bits, was about 10k.
But Microsoft's IBM BASIC (known as "Cassette BASIC") for the original
IBM PC ...
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