Hacker News Reader

To be fair to Microsoft, the C64 BASIC was notoriously outdated when the C64 shipped. Jack Tramiel managed to buy an unlimited-use license to Microsoft's BASIC in 1977, and was determined to get his money's worth. On the bright side, the C64 BASIC was great at motivating new programmers to learn assembly programming so they could avoid it, and in the process finding out how computers really work. :)

View on HN

This. I remember the C64 BASIC mostly as a glorified loader for the machine code. I even typed in a monitor published in some magazine just so I could push the machine nearer its limits.

Cut my teeth on Oric Atmos BASIC, and I can verify that my eyes still scan magazine listings intuitively looking for the DATA statements that indicate fast BLIT code ..

it motivated me to learn C.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com