5 ms·
An excellent article. Bill Gates himself posted a comment: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43#comment-1033 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43#comment-1033
by csl 1y ago
An excellent article. Bill Gates himself posted a comment: https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43#comment-1033 https://www.pagetable.com/?p=43#comment-1033
- RetroTechie 1y agoNice! From that comment: "There were a lot of interesting versions of BASIC done for Japanese machines this article misses (..)" Most likely referring to MSX-Basic. Which shows it's (c) Microsoft on the startup screen. Not the fastest, but a very full-featured Basic compared to most Basics around @ the time. Iirc it does non-integer math on BCD coded values. Single & double precision, so users can decide RAM use/speed/precision tradeoffs. Maybe there were other Japanese machines using MS-supplied Basics before that. But if so, likely few (any?) after MSX was introduced ('83), since that was big in Japan leaving little room for 8-bit competitors.
- dhosek 1y agoMy very first computer was a Spectravideo MSX computer which I got in exchange for writing some demo programs for the midwest distributor for the company. Fun little machine, although I still preferred Apple in general.
- qingcharles 1y agoWhat do you think his hn username is? :)
- breadwinner 1y agobillg. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=billg https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=billg
- dang 1y agoActual billg would probably not have posted, er, teenwag.com: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6121 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6121. (It was killed as spam but I've unkilled it now so it's visible to users who don't have 'showdead' turned on.)
- qingcharles 1y agoMy curiosity got the best of me. I checked archive.org to see what it was. A digg clone for celeb porn links? Was rightfully tagged as spam :)
- dang 1y agoIf actual billg ever wants the account we'll be happy to recycle the username!