Thread · HN Continuity

It tells a specific counterfactual story, but it's one that has a reasonable background for it.

If you were a new computer user in 1980, your Appie II+ or PET 8032 booted straight into BASIC, and it was a good-enough tool that could do productive development for the entire life of the machine there.

But if you were a new computer user in 1990, you didn't have that. They gave you GW-BASIC, and if you're lucky a separate manual rather than a vague chapter in the main DOS manual. This might be enough to give you some initial experience with programming, but you have a bunch of hard brick walls.

Your machine might have 640k-4Mb of memory, but GW-BASIC can only meaningfully work with 64k of it. You can't access the mouse or any post-EGA graphics modes without a LOT of assembly shimming. If you had a sound card, it was outside the built-in tooling.

Remember, this is a few years before the Internet being widely available, and stuff like the GNU project being widely accessible. This is probably the best development tool you have available

If you wanted to go further in programming, it meant buying a boxed compiler that probably cost well in excess of USD100, and was for a completely different language than the one you had cut your teeth on.

But if you wanted "The GW-BASIC I already understand, but more", you want this.