> In high school in 1980 we had Commodore PETs. They had no tangible OS, just a BASIC interpreter in ROM.
Five years later the Commodore 128 appeared. It had the best of both worlds: could run all C64 games and CP/M. These were magic times.
Five years later the Commodore 128 appeared. It had the best of both worlds: could run all C64 games and CP/M. These were magic times.
I passed it on, but wish I didn’t. At this point, I probably could have replaced the switch.
Addressing a maximum of 64KiB of memory back when 4KiB was expensive seemed fine. And due to cost, picking an 8-bit processor for a design in 1980 seemed sensible. But the ability to support up to 1MiB of RAM (eventually) on the 8086 series help insure the platform's longevity, in spite of the horrible segmented memory programming model.
Companies like Motorola weren't terribly interested in backwards compatibility, preferring instead to design completely new instruction sets (like the 68K family) for their 32-bit platforms.
Edit: just remembered something that made it even worse than just the awful keys - all reserved words for BASIC were tokenized in some way where you had to use a control-key sequence to tell it PRINT, for instance, instead of being able to type P,R,I,N,T <enter>.
and Atari ST price point, or 80% Amiga 500