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Comment by indymike | Hacker News Reader

You know, CP/M and DOS computers were kind of the exception among their contemporaries: most 8bit (and some 16 bit) microcomputers of the era booted to a BASIC prompt, and would either user special BASIC commands or POKE calls to load stuff. Looking forward to seeing what comes out of this re-imagining.

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True IBM PCs (up until the PC-AT, I believe) would also boot into BASIC if the floppy drive was empty and there was no fixed disk. In fact, in early versions of PC-DOS, all the basic command did was bootstrap the ROM BASIC, so it didn’t work on later clones.

The early PS/2 line, at least, would still boot into BASIC, if I remember correctly. I'm fairly certain my Model 70 386 would do so, but I can't remember if I had to disconnect the hard disk or what. Anyway, I definitely remember the Model 25s doing so, but of course they were closer to XTs than they were to "real" PS/2s.

The ThinkPad 701 with the butterfly keyboard would bring up BASIC if you removed the hard drive. That was a 486, none of the later machines seemed to do so.

Aw geez one more reason to want one of those things…

Anything that used IBM BIOS would do that. Not sure when it stopped, but I remember having some PS/2s Model 80 and 70s (386) do that.

Agreed. Having commands for "the DOS" (in the generic sense of a disk operating system) commingled with BASIC was the norm for the Apple II, Commodore 64, and Atari 8-bit machines. The PC was definitely the oddball when it came to having a separate DOS command line and BASIC interpreter.

ROM BASIC was available on IBM PCs but clones typically didn't have it.

Probably because it was aimed at business and IBM knew many of their customers would like to use something besides BASIC. So a separate minimal OS and development environments made more sense.

IBM didn't know what to do (no one really did), so you could boot to DOS or you could boot to PC-BASIC. The PC even supported boot to BASIC and load from cassette like a $300 home computer. Crazy times.

IBM had been established for decades before the PC, also the PC in general was established for years before their entry. I think they knew what to do. It was a bit of a gamble, sure. And you can make the argument they guessed wrong. But the success of the PC and subsequent crushing of the rest of the industry was incredibly successful.

The flexible design did catch on, simultaneously a blessing and a curse to IBM.

By the way, most Atari 8-bits had BASIC built-in, but the earliest machines, the 400, 800 and 1200XL, did not.

The Tandy TRS-80 line of computers which were the bestselling 8-bit computers until 1982 also didn't have commands for "the DOS" commingled with BASIC. The various DOS's available for the platform booted directly from disk.

The basic in ROM on IBM PCs was cassette basic and only supported loading and saving from cassette tapes. Although there might have been an obscure clone manufacturer or two which supported a cassette tape interface, in general clone makers didn't so there was no needed for an embedded cassette basic. Even IBM didn't support a cassette tape interface after the original IBM PC (5150). This meant that for years you could boot an IBM computer to cassette basic but not actually load or save any BASIC programs once you had done so.

The TRS-80 Color Computer's DOS commands were part of Disk Extended Color Basic, unlike the Z-80/68000 based machines.

I think today's version would be ulisp[0].

You get a powerful, structured, and easy to learn language that is also pretty trivial to implement while also being capable of low-level assembly access if really needed and to even compile native binaries for much better performance than most BASIC ever dreamed of.

[0] http://www.ulisp.com

paired with https://justine.lol/sectorlisp/

Nah. It has too many ().

So... just an inexpensive lisp machine? That's actually really interesting.

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