On 10/6/22 13:40, Tommy Phillips wrote:
Just for the record, I have really enjoyed the discussion that my
off-hand remark sparked!
Me too.
I agree with Mike that it's at least from the outside conceptually a bit
like Android, or IOS or PalmOS.
It's also one of the few things that makes the 600 still barely barely
in this family.
It's 8086 and entirely different firmware and architecture, but it is
still a main menu front-end to a set of both rom and ram apps,
battery-backed volatile ram storage for apps & files, and the serial &
parallel ports are physically the same as the k85 clones (and unlike
everything else). At least HH/OS (Hand Held OS) actually has "OS" in
it's name, and it's functionally/conceptually the same as the 100's main
menu. But unlike 100/k85, it isn't based on BASIC, it doesn't even
include BASIC by default.
But as Mike points out, even on the 100, BASIC is really just another
rom app, not the primary interface to the machine. Well mostly. I'm sure
the main rom uses library functions from BAISC, so it's not that you
could literally remove it, and further than that there are a handful of
ordinary operations where the interface is only through BASIC, like
deleting a file. But those are the minority. You don't need to start
from a BASIC prompt to RUN an app like say on a COCO. The machine is
largely driven by the main menu and the actual apps. You could do a lot
with only rarely actually needing to enter the BASIC command line.
But both BASIC itself like on some machines, and the main menu + BASIC
on the 100, or HH/OS on the 600 are all operating systems. That was
three, so not both, thrith? trith?
--
bkw
On 10/6/2022 10:57 AM, Mike Stein wrote:
As I said elsewhere that point of view certainly applies to systems
like Commodore where everything including loading other programs is
done through BASIC, the system prompt is actually a BASIC command prompt
IMO the Model T is uniquely different in fundamental ways; the
'system prompt' is the MENU and you can certainly load and run
TELCOM, TEXT, etc. and most machine language programs without ever
invoking BASIC at all.
m
On Thu, Oct 6, 2022 at 12:46 PM Jerry Stratton <model...@hoboes.com>
wrote:
On Sep 29, 2022, at 4:52 PM, Tommy Phillips
<to...@tommyphillips.info> wrote:
> A BASIC operating environment doesn't really meet the
definition of "operating system".
I just recently re-read John G. Kemeny’s “Man and the Computer”.
He specifically describes BASIC as an attempt to create “a new
language… that facilitated communication between man and machine.”
While it was written for time-sharing computers rather than as
the sole operating system, this philosophy made it a natural
choice for a very simple operating system for these earlier
computers. It was interactive and was “a direct communication
between computer and human being” that translated well into a
simple command-line operating system.
Kemeny envisioned BASIC programming as “teaching the computer”
and “imparting intelligence to computers”. The “collaboration”
that Kemeny envisioned BASIC facilitating between man and machine
is somewhat forgotten today, when even BASIC tends to involve
multiple steps and is used as an application separate from the
machine. But that philosophy baked into the language, made it, in
my opinion, almost inevitable (when combined with BASIC’s very
low memory and CPU overhead) that it would be used for the
operating system as well.
https://archive.org/details/mancomputer00keme/
Jerry Stratton
https://hoboes.com/coco/
“We invented machinery to save and surpass our bodies’ labour;
now we have invented computers to save and surpass the labour of
our minds.”—Peter Laurie, The Joy of Computers
--
Tommy Phillips
to...@tommyphillips.info
303-981-4310
