On Sun, May 4, 2025 at 12:43 PM Steve Lewis via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote:
> I just had the impression Wang was doing some early form of this, > as they referred to their BASIC as "hard-wired." Or in other words, you > can't point to a single chip and say "there is the Wang BASIC ROM" (but I'm > speculating, hence the question to try to clarify on their pre-1974 systems) It seems to just be 16K BASIC in ROM as far as I can see. They describe it as MICROCODE and the Wikipedia article talks about how the microcode implemented the instructions for BASIC thus providing an abstraction layer that later allowed replacing the native hardware underneath while retaining compatibility. But then that's what any BASIC interpreter does really isn't it? >From their 1974 ad (image in the Wikipedia article) they say "...you get a CPU with 16K bytes of BASIC language instructions hardwired into the electronics" then in the next paragraph "The hardwired MOS ROM language..." so honestly, I don't see how any of this is any different than a conventional microcomputer with BASIC in ROM. I think the rest is just awkward market-speak because what they are describing hadn't really been done before so the terminology was still up in the air as to what to call it. If they released it five years later, they would probably just have said "computer with 16K BASIC in ROM" because that's what it is.
