On Wed, 22 Dec 1999, Alan Mead wrote:
> As for SmallTalk being an OS, I dont know but IIRC BASIC was essentially
> the OS of the early Macs.
I don't know much about the early macs, but I do know that BASIC was part
and parcel of the OS for several micros of that era - Commodore PET and
64, Apple and Apple II, maybe even the earliest IBM PC/XT machines. I
would have guessed that the first Macs were Apple's first departure from
BASIC-as-OS, but I've never been much interested in Macs so I don't really
know.
If memory serves, I saw reference to part of the system ROM for an old 386
being designated for BASIC (alongside the BIOS). It was of course used
for other things (or nothing) by that time, but there were still traces of
it in the documentation. This was backs when serial and parallel port
pinouts and even timing diagrams were commonly included with the
computers..
I had some exposure to Smalltalk in college, and wouldn't be at all
surprised to see it used as an OS. Heck, if Java had an inherent
development environment, the two would be interchangeable. :-)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Assume just 4 million businesses on the Internet today...
If 1% of them sent you one piece of junk email per year,
you'd still have to wade through over 100 messages per day.
--
To unsubscribe: mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "unsubscribe"
as the Subject.
