Ha! Yes! As Monte Python would say, "Well......It got better!"Ah, memory lane time again :-) Oh, you had advanced BASIC - it allowed nested for loops! :-) My first BASIC only allowed for loops that could be written in a single line...Anything more complex you had to call a subroutine with GOSUB.
The OSI "machine" I learned BASIC on, had 8K of usable RAM (I could have bought it with 4K RAM instead,Yes, I remember those days, in fact 48K was quite generous! My original box only had 16K RAM and 16K ROM for the OS and interpreter.
but I splurged) and I used a radio shack cassette tape to store my programs and play them back into the
CORE. Speaking of ROM, I remember setting there in front of the TV screen, thinking this means if they
upgrade the OS, I am going to have to throw away the second most populated board in the machine!
(The biggest board was the nearly empty BUS back plane board.
OSI led the micro computer revolution in technical innovation. We were years ahead of the other microcomputerYou had Disks?!! We were using loops of punched tape...
manufacturers. Of course, at the onset, WE CHEATED. (Cheating is natural...sometimes...) We didn't wait for the
little hard drives or small floppies that were priced right. Instead, we immediately adapted, and used the more
expensive Industrial components available for the REAL COMPUTERS of our day, which were all around us already.
This move immediately PUSHED US FORWARD in OS development. So, early on, we had the option of 8 inch industry standard dual floppies, a 40 MB and 80 MB Winchester hard drives (they were very big and very heavy), and OSI quickly added time sharing capability to the OS, which opened up a whole new level of capability and opportunity, then distributed processing, then Multiprocessing, etc. while the rest of the micro computer world lagged behind us. We were the first in
the microcomputer world to do all these things. In fact, OSI created and marketed the first SINGLE BOARD COMPUTER which they called the PC. (That's right. IBM stole the name from OSI. It is very true, the victor writes the history.)
So, with these innovations our OS and BASIC were pushed for increased capability. This, of course, was all done on the
8 bit 6502 chip which had the advantage of pipe line processing. So, while the 6502 was seen as a gaming
chip by the world, running video arcades in the mall, we were running full blown timeshare computer systems on it. It was only natural that later OSI jumped to the Motorola 68,000 series chip which had pipe line capability also. Each step from time sharing forward, gave us orders of magnitude of capability over our peers and bigger and bigger teeth to bite IBM with. It was a magical time......full of wonderful risks. Ha Ha Ha
Yes. Our Basic was very advanced for its time. When Steve Jobs began doing his Apple thing with realAnd here we have another advanced feature. Our BASIC didn't renumber GOTO or GOSUB statements, you had to do that manually. Thats why we used a lot of GOSUB but very few GOTO. And SUBs were all given 1000 lines each to minimise risk of renumbering...
money, he came back to OSI, and wanted to purchase "rights" for the stuff he had written for us. The factory
made it's second biggest mistake by not SHARING the OS and the BASIC with Apple. That would have
put both Apple and OSI on the same team against IBM, and made all the software being developed on their
6502 platform run on ours also and viceversa. Oh? What was the first biggest mistake? The factory turned
down the wall street guys who wanted to take them public, and those same brokers went to Apple next,
and took them public instead.
Ooops!
Essentially, I agree with you completely from the lifetime viewpoint of software. From the productivityDepends on how you measure excellence. A lot of excellent software has been written by companies that went bust. The software was sufficiently excellent to survive and be bought out or just made publicly available as open source. So excellence can also be measured on how long lived the software is regardless of how long lived be the commercial body that created it.
business point of view, I would have said it differently, but we both would have ended up with the same
goal. No one floats far on thin ice.
Ha! Yes. We used PEEK/POKE also in our BASIC STATEMENTS, but soon left that behind.But I've fortunately never been limited to one language, even on my most primitive machines I've had recourse to assembler, and usually some kind of scripting environment. Only on very early PCs, where BASIC was the OS was I so restricted - and PEEK/POKE were my friends :-).
Before we went into business, however, as we surveyed the lay of the land, and we saw people
laboriously toggling programs in binary into Emsai and Altair machines by flipping switches, and
we saw people programming in assembler, and we looked into that, but the bottom line for my thinking
was, THIS IS ALL TOO SLOW. And slow meant that RESPONSE SOLUTIONS to changing customer
needs would come far too late, and probably much later than hitting the iceberg. This was a major
reason we latched onto BASIC and stay there. Later, we hired people from time to time to create
utilities that we could employ via BASIC, that were written in Assembler or C later yet, but that
represented a very minute part of our stuff. Things like faster GARBAGE COLLECTION routines, etc.
Which brings us back to why I have picked PYTHON. It is fast to do development work in, and
excellent enough to leave working code as PYTHON, rather than writing it into something else
later. Further, I don't like to repeat myself, and do things more than once. When I finish something,
I want it to be done, and get on with life, and the next step. The fact is, at my age, I am looking for
a way NOT TO EXPAND past Python into any other language. I want one excellent language to
concentrate my investment time into which will then magnify my skills learned, and let me apply
them and my language in any situation I run into on my way to the bank. I am looking for ONE
LANGUAGE to get me from scratch to a finished business in play......a ZERO DOLLAR BUDGETING
PHILOSOPHY OF PROGRAMMING SPECIALIZATION, if you get my drift. That means that language
must be versatile and excel in the majority of areas I will encounter, whatever they may be, and at
least adequate for those "other" areas where few have tread with the language before. Python sure
looks like it fits in that class of animal from where I am standing....of course, I am looking from a long
distance in time, from where I left the industry.......but still.....I also trust my instincts. And I have a
very strong feeling about Python. I would put money on it. In fact, I am going to do just that.
I intend to completely automate this business as close to 100% as possible, letting it do the accounting,
banking, etc. (either hand writing those packages or integrating them from what is available using PYTHON like glue),
and put the applicable portions of it on the web. (And no, I have been out of the computer world inventing strange
devices for quite some time, so, I have no idea which software parts go where yet. Like, is it possible to safely put EVERYTHING on the web site, like automated accounting of the books, etc? )
--And I have decided to let the LANGUAGE take me there, much the way you recommend a bit later in this
letter, where you say to trust the language. I do. From my prior experience I understand that THE WAY OF
THE LANGUAGE is everything. Right now, my goal is to actually grasp that about Python. Ha.
My assessment is, PYTHON is the most probable SINGLE path language that has the potential to carry me to
my goal from where it is located on the advancing time line of events, and if this is so, I want to ride it, as a single
language ride, it greatly minimizes my learning curve and investment time. And since I am business
orientated, it isn't about the intellectual, although that is always great to have, it is about getting from here
to there efficiently, and being able to respond quickly to what I didn't think of when it bites me
in the ass out of the blue, and getting the action going in the market, and then being able to quickly fine tune
or even change directions in my code in real time (business real time), or as near that as possible. And that
all appears to be in the nature of PYTHON. This is the same way I picked my computer and programming horse
in the beginning of the microcomputer revolution. Somethings are still inherent in the situation. In the end,
the language and the subsequent code created, are just tools to an end.........although I will probably burn
incense at night in front of the Python Bible..........just in case.
So, my goal will be, regardless of what lanugage any packages are written in that I might use, to do all my own work,
whatever that turns out that I need to do, from scratch to final website business, in PYTHON. Does it sound like
it can be done?
> only real concern has been in how the flow of python works for the WHOLE > PROGRAM FLOW, and you all have help me a lot here.......and I really One of the things that some folks find hard is divorcing themselves from that old line by line way of thinking. Modern languages can seem a little like black magic at times(*) - especially when you start programming with objects. The trick is to trust the language and just believe it will work! :-) (*)I'm having the same problem right now with the JSP Tomcat/Struts framework where all sorts of magical things just seem to happen. I keep fighting my desire to go trawl through the source code to see what's going on.
Ha! I know that instinct well....
Then I tell myself ' just trust in the force Luke...'
I will take your advice! Thanks. Another good one is, "STAY ON TARGET!"
Anyway, I am generally not this chatty. And I will try to keep my future questions brief. But now that I am
working my way back into the computer world, it is good to have found Python, as I feel I recognize it, even
from a distance. I know I have a long ways to go....
Thanks,
Terry
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