Oct. 7th, 2013

liam_on_linux: (Default)
I guess that it all stems out of a vague feeling of ennui that's been growing in me for years concerning computers.

My Spectrum was an amazing toy (and I do use the word advisedly). I played with CBM PETs and ZX-81s but while interesting they could not do pictures or sound, which were things of more interest to me around 12YO or so. The Spectrum delivered sound, pictures, and a usable BASIC (I switched to Beta BASIC quite early on) at a price well below anything else. The VIC20 was too limited, the C64 had great hardware but a crappy BASIC, the Acorn 8-bits were vastly too expensive, and so on.

Then I got a job and could afford a used Archimedes. Simple, comprehensible OS, *really* good BASIC, wonderful graphics and sound beyond my meagre abilities to exploit and vast CPU power. As the late gkewney@cix said of the IBM PC-AT: "my first experience of Raw Computer Power". Well, for me it was the Archimedes, and dickp@cix's review of it in Personal Computer World was a clincher.

(You can read that here and I recommend it. It's one of the few computer reviews ever to contain quotable lines: http://acorn.chriswhy.co.uk/docs/Mags/PCW/PCW_Aug87_Archimedes.pdf )

Then I went x86. Horrible Byzantine OSes, a wide choice of programming languages but nothing that delivered the simple benefits of BBC BASIC, and I quickly lost interest in programming as a result.

What follows is 20Y of supporting the things instead.
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