On Sat, 13 Feb 2021 19:52:26 GMT
David Higton  wrote:

> In message 
>           Joe  wrote:
>
> > The nice thing about the Acorns was a decent BASIC with a built-in
> > assembler. I eventually bought a PC and was astounded that I had to
> > *buy* a useful programming environment, all it came with was GW
> > BASIC, which wasn't great. I took the Delphi path, which is why
> > I've never more than dabbled in C.
>
> Get yourself a Raspberry Pi, install RISC OS on it, and enjoy those
> pleasures again - but the OS and the BASIC have had the benefit of
> many years of improvement since the Archimedes days.
>

I understand you, and I know RiscOS is available for the Pi, but I
don't think I could go back now. The enormous memory, being able to run
(most) BBC games much more smoothly, the speed of that first hard
drive... none of those things mean much now.

I assume you can no longer cause mayhem by dropping a directory into
itself: I did that accidentally, turned off the power after the machine
hung, and found an (apparently) infinite series of nesting... I fixed
it, studying the filesystem and writing a recursive bit of BASIC to
plumb the depths of the nest and delete it level by level (the OS
wouldn't touch it), but I wasn't too impressed that such a thing was
possible.

OK, RiscOS in those days was half a megabyte of ROM (no bugs allowed).
I remember my first PC: Win95 was about 25MB in size, and it did more
than the RiscOS of the day, but to be fair, not fifty times as much.

--
Joe

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05