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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I too owned a whole bunch of Acorn stuff. Most of the software was excellent. The best basic interpreter around and a very good shot at a DOS.

The Acorn 'Unicorn' was excellent but too expensive and this is roughly where the parent comment comes in. So Acorn did a lot of good stuff before they lost the plot, roughly around the time they released the Archimedes, which was an amazing machine for the time but the Amiga had far surpassed anything Acorn could offer software wise and the ST and Commodore were gobbling up the lower end.

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Yes the BASIC interpreter was the best thing there was on the platform. Mainly for me at least because it was heavily structured, didn't require line numbering like earlier versions and had a stupidly powerful inline assembler.

I had a 1040ST and an Amiga 500 at the time as well (spot the geek) and the software wasn't that great on those platforms either IMHO. Even PDS on DOS was nicer to program in with the 2kg pile of manuals.

The killer was the rise of the PC and you know what; I'm glad it killed everything. Perhaps controversially, a couple of years down the line and as someone who wanted to get shit done back then, things like Windows 3, VB, Word, Excel, OLE appearing were clearly the future.

I'll grant you excel.

*sheet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewSheet

Yes, sheet was pretty good. (As was word!), but Excel really had the edge there, even when it first came out.

It's the one product by MS that stood out as being best-in-class straight from day one.

.. by being a careful GUI clone of the existing successful product, Lotus 1-2-3. Right down to being largely formula-compatible and having the same hotkeys. That's why F2 is "edit current cell".

Excel was so nice I wrote my documents in it. I wonder how much of Microsoft was built on its fame.

It was ok until I lost the function key strip :)

http://rayharper.co.uk/acorn/bbc_images/fn_key_strips.pdf

Thanks - about 25 years too late. Plus I didn't have the Internet then! :)

Much more authentic:

https://twitter.com/bbc_micro_/status/572313372345016321

The plastic which held them in place was always broken on the school computers :-)

In all seriousness though, I personally owe a great debt to Sophie Wilson et al for building computers and software that made it very easy to start programming the second after turning a computer on; A BASIC interpreter and an Assembler available instantly from ROM. I had endless hours of fun building parallax scrolling star fields by poking directly to video RAM and slowly rendering 3d scenes in Render Bender. It was just a shame that the computers were so expensive.

I spent about a year of savings on my 'beeb' and it was the best money I ever spent. All tricked out it cost as much as a very decent second hand car, a very large amount of money for me back then, I very much recall that I bought the drive enclosure long before I could afford the drives (I basically bought the whole thing piece-by-piece as money became available). Because I couldn't afford the drives I hacked my Sony cassette deck to function as a sort of poor-mans disk drive by connecting the buttons to the user port and the end-of-tape detector to an input pin so I could tell roughly where the head was on the tape. Really slow, especially during on-tape sorting but it worked.

A friend of mine who had rich parents got his + 2 HD drives for his birthday, I had to take the long way around but eventually got there.

Without that machine I'm pretty sure my career would have started 5 years later.

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