BASIC on the early 8, and more generally 16 bit machines was quite a bit more empowering than pop media tends to speak to.
My uncle Bob (seriously, I have the generic uncle "Bob"), developed real estate contracts using a combination of C64 BASIC and some word processor that allowed for conditional and parametric document assembly, almost Word Perfect style!
He built up quite a business with those efforts!
A bit later a friend wrote an entire trucking business on the PC running GWBASIC.
I myself started out on a beat up Atari 400 with the Atari BASIC cartridge and the cassette storage peripheral I struggle to recall the name of right now.... 410! That was it.
I wrote TV test and alignment programs. Learned all that working at a TV repair shop as a kid. The Atari had just a couple capabilities that made a huge difference too!
One of those was at least 8 grey shades. I know GTIA could deliver 16 and I ended up using them once I made enough to get a newer 800 XL machine.
Another feature was full overscan graphics. 48 bytes per line instead of 40. That made it possible to draw the full frame patterns and properly identify the safe area for viewers wanting the factory setup, and expand viewing for others without showing blank non raster regions on their screen.
Side bar:
Older sets would often under scan by quite a bit! Correcting that often meant a lot to those viewers.
End Side bar
Another feature was enough colors to calibrate a TV for good color more than close enough. I could get purity tests, set color delay phase and some other items pretty well!
Last feature was 320 pixels in the safe area NTSC. That is two pixels per color clock cycle. When set to monochrome, those pixels were just right for focus, convergence, linearity and the whole test pattern.
All this was some percent off the pro gear, but I found out most people do not care. And I mostly didn't either.
As a famous YouTube I love says, "Good enough for the girls I go out with" (AvE)
BASIC with a few PEEK and POKE commands and the occasional bit of machine language was enough to do a lot!
COMPUTE! Published a nice assembler and disassembler too. For some work, a guy could get setup well enough to produce good programs.
Getting back to XP...
I wrote the above for perspective. Of course XP can make sense. So can DOS, an Amiga, and Windows 3.11, just ask Southwest airlines.
Fact is many of us here can probably work magic with whatever gets put into our hands. I can.
And all these skills couple with microcontrollers too.
Perhaps that warrants discussion here too one day. The skills are a great match and when one can build hardware feature matched to the use case?
My uncle Bob (seriously, I have the generic uncle "Bob"), developed real estate contracts using a combination of C64 BASIC and some word processor that allowed for conditional and parametric document assembly, almost Word Perfect style!
He built up quite a business with those efforts!
A bit later a friend wrote an entire trucking business on the PC running GWBASIC.
I myself started out on a beat up Atari 400 with the Atari BASIC cartridge and the cassette storage peripheral I struggle to recall the name of right now.... 410! That was it.
I wrote TV test and alignment programs. Learned all that working at a TV repair shop as a kid. The Atari had just a couple capabilities that made a huge difference too!
One of those was at least 8 grey shades. I know GTIA could deliver 16 and I ended up using them once I made enough to get a newer 800 XL machine.
Another feature was full overscan graphics. 48 bytes per line instead of 40. That made it possible to draw the full frame patterns and properly identify the safe area for viewers wanting the factory setup, and expand viewing for others without showing blank non raster regions on their screen.
Side bar:
Older sets would often under scan by quite a bit! Correcting that often meant a lot to those viewers.
End Side bar
Another feature was enough colors to calibrate a TV for good color more than close enough. I could get purity tests, set color delay phase and some other items pretty well!
Last feature was 320 pixels in the safe area NTSC. That is two pixels per color clock cycle. When set to monochrome, those pixels were just right for focus, convergence, linearity and the whole test pattern.
All this was some percent off the pro gear, but I found out most people do not care. And I mostly didn't either.
As a famous YouTube I love says, "Good enough for the girls I go out with" (AvE)
BASIC with a few PEEK and POKE commands and the occasional bit of machine language was enough to do a lot!
COMPUTE! Published a nice assembler and disassembler too. For some work, a guy could get setup well enough to produce good programs.
Getting back to XP...
I wrote the above for perspective. Of course XP can make sense. So can DOS, an Amiga, and Windows 3.11, just ask Southwest airlines.
Fact is many of us here can probably work magic with whatever gets put into our hands. I can.
And all these skills couple with microcontrollers too.
Perhaps that warrants discussion here too one day. The skills are a great match and when one can build hardware feature matched to the use case?
Boom goes the Dynamite!