- and of course you can find it at https://winworldpc.com/product/quickbasic/45
they also have the cut down qbasic that came with dos 5 and 6 as well on that site.
- used quick basic professional the 'grown up' version for years in 90s onwards. great language.
just avoid touching the serial port with it. that way lies madness. :-)
- is there a policy for what do do with duplicate posts? just there are 2 on the front page right now.
- if you use mastodon you can follow the creator of this podcast at
- there is a retro podcast Floppy Days that covered the zx spectrum in 7 parts (there's lots of history)
some might find it worth a listen. they're sure to have covered your own personal fave computer at this stage.
https://floppydays.libsyn.com/floppy-days-115-zx-spectrum-pa...
- i shamelessly lifted this post from the post of the person who scanned them on mastodon.
- have to admit i'm fascinated by this. a micro computer years older than the altair which is widely considered the start of the micro computing industry.
so many questions:
* how many were made?
* what software was available?
* what languages did it support?
* what did it connect to?
* how did it fall out of the public eye to have been forgotten so completely?
* are there are any still in the hands of original owners who could help fill in all the gaps?
* do we have the names of the designers or programmers so that we can follow up their careers and see if there's more info there?
- not everything needs to be connected to the internet. it's nice to have an old simple system that is secure because it's connected to nothing. it's solid, reliable and doesn't need megabytes or gigabyte of updates to keep secure.
solid hardware built to last. this is selection bias at it's best mind as the ones we collect are the ones that have survived and not the flimsy cheap systems that died early. problems that do exist have been rectified or worked around so there should be no nasty shocks in the next 10 years with them.
single tasking. it allows us to focus on doing one thing and doing it well. we've grown too used to having 10-20 programs running at same time and swapping between them. it can be beneficial to concentrate on just one thing avoid distractions.
- >solid hardware
You’ve clearly not owned Atari gear :-). The keyboard eventually goes. I think I’m on #3 for my Atari 1200. I never owned an ST so I cannot speak to the durability of those devices.
- atari computers never made it to ireland or at least i never saw one in the flesh.
as a fan of sinclair i know about bad keyboards :-) but they could be repaired. there was a thriving market in add on real keyboards. looking today and i can find
https://blog.adafruit.com/2023/06/14/a-zx81-replacement-mech.../
which for a system over 40 years old is not too shabby.
it's not like some modern machines where if the keyboard was broken by someone eating toast nearby the machine can only be fixed by the manufacturer for considerable cost.
- 6.7k for a text editor is luxury on such a micro system.
use ted.com https://texteditors.org/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TED
<3k. and will do all you want.
- More
Would be cool if the site software warned you about that, but that is incredibly low, low, low ask.
Would it be too much of an ask to style http articles differently so we know what’s safe(r) to click ?