The case for a new Apache/Google “Java”

Quoting:Sorry guys, but Ti-Basic beats Python and Ruby

Second that.

Funny thing was, any BASIC program was "open software" by default, and in practice you could say it was Free Software, because nobody was going to enforce copyright or patents anyway. Also, there was no way at all of protecting software; no way to have serials because you just changed "if" to "if not(" and you would be done.

The 83-dialect is about the only interpreted computer language where you can store the command "Output(" in only 1 byte , and you can do cool optimizations like rewriting "log(C)+1" to 1+log(C", no need to close parentheses so eventually saving 1 byte. And you can manually type in hex-assembly and run it with a simple "send(9****". Running the self-test actually reset the whole thing and all content was lost, which was kinda... Er, interesting to say the least. Building your own pixel routines was also great fun, making your own mega-slow snake game in Basic on the 4mHz processor. It could be overclocked with a 0.1pF capacitor, but I think that was just a bad internet-joke to fool people like me, because no matter how hard I searched, I couldn't find one. Even not in the 600+ Conrad-catalog.

What I always liked the most of the machine, was making up random hex-numbers - especially using CD a lot(assembly call to address!), and then running it as assembly and see what happens. Sometimes, you received the weirdest output, almost destroying the machine as well; and you needed to remove all batteries for over a minute to have it back. Once, I made my screen display purple lines. Which is kind of funny, because it's a black and white screen. And sometimes you could display nice garbled ASCII-chars all around the screen.

Such a great machine! Almost sad I own a 89 now; as it seemed ~32k was all I ever needed. When you needed an 'objects-like system', you wrote it yourself in BASIC; because out of the box it didn't support it. You just used integer-variables as 'messages to send to objects', and upon receiving those ints the 'objects' could decide which block of code to run, hence emulating object-oriented in BASIC. I even emulated linked lists (of course it didn't support those), which was kind of funny because I even 'nested' them (with the lengths all at the beginning and actual data at the end BTW), they actually worked but I had never ever even heard of linked lists back then. I also devised my own zipping-algorithm which used a QuadReg to match the isotrope table of the table of elements as closely as possible, and only save differences between data and the QuadReg. And it wasn't designed to convert numbers to strings, the only way possible was about the obscurest algorithm ever designed by human, by means of doinng a LinReg; matching {1,2} against {A,2A} and then retrieving 'a'.

Also, I went on the hunt for a primitive of the 'normal distribution' function, and my hunt lasted for about a year. Because only after a year, I learned that function mathematically just didn't exist; which might have explained my failure to find it. Needed to reload my batteries about every month, I recall. And you could drop it, even throw it around the classroom, spill coffee over it, clean the keyboard with soap after it and it still survived.

Back then, I didn't know what a compiler was, so I thought you had to translate ASM to Hex by hand. I printed out 50+ pages of translation tables from ASM to Hex, but just before I started using them I found out you could let a computer do the translation. What a great invention!

Yeah, those were the days! Maybe one of the last pieces of great US/Taiwanese engineering, who'd tell?

And now we have 1.5gHz dual core full HD phones costing less than a 89. Wel, that's not bad, but the freakin' things running Java on the other hand is.