Which classic comp offered the best hardware/software integration?

[Keatah]

2 hours ago, JamesD said:

Well, there was a bit of snobbery in academia.  You can't be taught anything once you've learned BASIC,

Piss'n'shit all over academia. Bunch of crotchety old men going senile.. I still use Applesoft Basic. Presently to generate scripts that plug into Firefox to mass download stuff from Internet Archive.

[zzip]

On 7/16/2022 at 6:38 PM, JamesD said:

C may be horrible for beginners, but they are teaching java to beginners.

Java has more guardrails than C and and it is widely used in the real world,  so you could do worse for an intro language.

 

 

[MrMaddog]

On 7/18/2022 at 9:43 AM, zzip said:

Java has more guardrails than C and and it is widely used in the real world,  so you could do worse for an intro language.

 

 

 

Ugh, Java is even more harder as an introduction to programming...not only are you trying to learn the basics of programming itself but now you have to learn Object Oriented Programming (Yeah, OOPs indead!)

 

I had a hard time wrapping my head around objects used in programs in some classes (like C++) and didn't understand it until I made mods using UnrealScript (Like Java but using C syntax).

 

 

[zzip]

15 hours ago, MrMaddog said:

Ugh, Java is even more harder as an introduction to programming...not only are you trying to learn the basics of programming itself but now you have to learn Object Oriented Programming (Yeah, OOPs indead!)

 

I had a hard time wrapping my head around objects used in programs in some classes (like C++) and didn't understand it until I made mods using UnrealScript (Like Java but using C syntax).

When I was in school Object Oriented was a big buzzword in the industry but not (yet) part of our curriculum.    I would think these days OO would be taught.   At any rate, you can code "intro to programming" style Java programs with minimal OO knowledge

[DanBoris]

On 6/29/2022 at 7:25 PM, Keatah said:

For general discussion. Which classic comp do you believe offered the best hardware/software pairing & integration?

 

Biased or not I vote Apple II because of how easily I learned the ins & outs of Applesoft BASIC and then subsequently DOS. The mini-Assembler  and Monitor scores points too. Using DOS was like BASIC suddenly getting new commands. It was like a text adventure! New commands to make your character do new things.

 

It was like a hi-tech version of LOAD & SAVE for cassette, a concept all of us were familiar with. Lots of time to contemplate how things operated by the forced waiting for something to load. So us cassette users instantly knew two primary DOS commands straight away.

 

Consider how to see the contents of a disk, the Apple II was beyond simple. All a user had to do was type CATALOG. A list of the disk files appeared onscreen.

 

C64 way of things was ridiculous and retarded. You had to type LOAD"$",8 and LIST. The 6 year old in me was blown into a sea of confusion. Why would one use the LOAD command to see a list of files? And why the "$",8? Why was I looking on the disk for dollar signs? And after serious thought, why 8? I had only one drive device, and why call it "8" and not a normal sense-making "1". To add insult to brain stress we had to LIST it. More tedious typing. And the fucking procedure deleted your basic program from memory! Just 2x retarded.

 

The C64 required you to type 15 keystrokes and killed your in-memory program. The Apple II was simple, type 8 keystrokes. And it didn't erase your in-progress work!

 

Atari DOS 2.5 wasn't much better with a menu system. And I can only imagine what other systems of the day put their users through.

 

I liked Atari's DOS menu system, but the fact that there was no command in Atari BASIC to display a disk directory was really annoying. 

[hwrd]

On 6/29/2022 at 8:25 PM, Keatah said:

For general discussion. Which classic comp do you believe offered the best hardware/software pairing & integration?

I would propose the Atari ST.  The Operating system (TOS) was in ROM and mapped to the 68000 memory.

This not only made OS access fast (was in ROM, and not on a disk requiring motion based transfer),

but also left more free memory available ( ROM mapped to the 68000).

 

This gave the ST somewhere up to 192K more RAM available on a 512K system.

(hardware=> roms)

(software=> OS)

 

This is a different take on the question as answered so far....  🙂

On 6/29/2022 at 8:25 PM, Keatah said:

 

 

 

[BydoEmpire]

On 7/13/2022 at 12:19 PM, Krebizfan said:

C wasn't excluded. It was reserved for grad students whose thesis was creating an extension to Unix. UCSD's grad students had already created the development environment needed for Pascal so there wasn't much left for new theses. The transition of C into an undergrad language was a mistake. To properly program in C requires devoting a lot of effort to error trapping which the undergraduate courses didn't bother with.

My college (freshmen in 1991) didn't teach C, it was Pascal and one assembly language class.  Then around junior year I had classes that required C. So, I bought "Teach Yourself C in 21 Days" and the rest of my career is history.  It really wasn't a big deal, just another language... but then, I had a decade of BASIC, and some assembly and Pascal beforehand. C is still my favorite language. I wish I had taken the time to learn C when I had an Amiga in high school, but I was too busy playing games  Now I think about all the things I could have done!

Quote

A lot of C programmers graduated without the knowledge of how to write larger programs that didn't have hidden bugs.

All programs have hidden bugs! But I know what you mean  You can get yourself into trouble quickly if you're not thinking ahead and setting yourself up.

 

It's a good question as to what micro had the best integration. I'd probably vote Apple 2 because the hardware was more straightforward, so manipulating it with BASIC and Apple DOS was more straightforward. The c64 had more features, but the integration was certainly less elegant. Can't speak to the A8s and other micros.

Edited August 20, 2022 by BydoEmpire

[zzip]

On 8/20/2022 at 1:52 PM, hwrd said:

I would propose the Atari ST.  The Operating system (TOS) was in ROM and mapped to the 68000 memory.

This not only made OS access fast (was in ROM, and not on a disk requiring motion based transfer),

but also left more free memory available ( ROM mapped to the 68000).

 

This gave the ST somewhere up to 192K more RAM available on a 512K system.

(hardware=> roms)

(software=> OS)

 

This is a different take on the question as answered so far....  🙂

 

Yeah that was the good thing about TOS.   Bad thing was it was incomplete, and kind of unoptimized.    There were lots of 3rd party add-ons to improve the experience

[JamesD]

When I started college, there was a BASIC class, but I skipped that.
Fortran was the next class (number wise), then Pascal, COBOL, a languages class that gave an overview of 4 different languages, assembly language, etc...
C was taught as part of the Unix class at the university I transferred to but it was a sophomore level class.
Object oriented programming classes just started while I was there, and the book we used had objects represented as little clouds with arrows pointing to each other.
It wasn't until automated tools drew them as boxes that they were represented like is common now, and the first job I interviewed for I got knocked for my oop skills because the guy interviewing me had never seen objects represented that way before.

C isn't so much hard as it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot.
Java just has a larger learning curve before you can do anything.

Funny thing, most of the junior colleges I looked at attending don't have associate CS degrees anymore.  They have some "pre" computer science stuff but really don't teach many real CS classes.
Most of the stuff is IT.
If you want to learn CS, you are better off going to a 4 year college from the start.

[JamesD]

On 8/20/2022 at 11:52 AM, hwrd said:

I would propose the Atari ST.  The Operating system (TOS) was in ROM and mapped to the 68000 memory.

This not only made OS access fast (was in ROM, and not on a disk requiring motion based transfer),

but also left more free memory available ( ROM mapped to the 68000).

 

This gave the ST somewhere up to 192K more RAM available on a 512K system.

(hardware=> roms)

(software=> OS)

 

This is a different take on the question as answered so far....  🙂

 

Most of the libraries and devices that make up the AmigaOS are in ROM.  It freed up disk and RAM space.
The re-entrant code meant that no matter how many programs you had running, the only extra space used for those libraries/devices was the additional RAM for data specific to each program.
About all you needed on a disk was any additional fonts, custom libraries, settings, etc...
Even cards with custom drivers had their own ROM containing drivers, or initialization code to set up where a card was addressed in memory during startup.

[zzip]

24 minutes ago, JamesD said:

C isn't so much hard as it is easy to shoot yourself in the foot.

The hardest part about jumping into C coming from another language is how terse it is.   That's good in that it means less typing,  but also makes it hard to understand what is going on if your aren't used to the syntax.   No keywords like "BEGIN/END", "DO/DONE",  just brackets everywhere instead.   what the hell is "stdio",  what is "void"? why do some C programs use it and others don't?  etc.  Stuff like that used to make it seem daunting.   Seemed so alien for someone who started on BASIC.    

 

If you use it without pointers or dynamic memory, then it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, and it operates like a much less wordy Pascal-  well except for the funky way it handles strings..

but that's not where its real power is.   The pointers and dynamic memory give it a lot of power and allow it to do things that would otherwise require Assembly.

[MrMaddog]

4 hours ago, JamesD said:

Funny thing, most of the junior colleges I looked at attending don't have associate CS degrees anymore.  They have some "pre" computer science stuff but really don't teach many real CS classes.
Most of the stuff is IT.
If you want to learn CS, you are better off going to a 4 year college from the start.

 

If IT is all people want to go for, than there's no point of even going to college unless they offer certifications like some correspondence schools(*) do.

 

Otherwise they can just watch online videos and save up to take the tests...

 

(*) Disclaimer: I'm currently enrolled in an online school like that and enjoy it.