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by antimagic 3830 days ago
Ahhh, a most timely article, from my perspective. I've recently being writing a computer game for my first computer, which was a contemporary of the trash-80 (http://www.compucolor.org/emu/ccemu.html). The guy that made the emulator was working for NVIDIA last time I talked to him, and he thoughtfully provided most of the programming manuals for Compucolor II on the site.

Why? Well I was mostly expired from a story in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman" where he talks about being bored with physics, and he gets back into it by playing around with toy problems that he had to work out from first principles (the way that the wobble in a spinning plate precesses around the axis). So I've started programming in an emulator of this old 1980s computer. It seems to be working for me too - I'm finding myself to be much more engaged in my day job since I've started.
1 comments
flohofwoe 3830 days ago
Same here, that growing feeling that we have lost something during the 90's when home-computers were replaced by 'business PCs' drove me to write an emulator to preserve some of the magic in the past few months: http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/, here's how to write a 'Hello World!' program on it in BASIC, FORTH, machine code and assembler: http://floooh.github.io/virtualkc/p035_helloworld.html

In my opinion, the RaspberryPi is the closest thing to a home-computer we have today, it encourages to learn, experiment and create things, it would be nice if it had a simpler, more home-computer-like standard operating system though. Linux (or any other current desktop or mobile OS) is simply too complex and scary. In contrast to that, smartphones and tablets are closed ecosystems optimized for consumption. I don't see how these closed-off platforms encourage kids to explore and learn to create something on their own.

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jarcane 3830 days ago
The RISC OS people have produced a custom ROM that runs only BBC Basic at boot: https://www.riscosopen.org/content/sales/risc-os-pico

There's also some stuff here on the RPi site on other BASIC options: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-50-years-of-bas...

I would actually love to re-case an RPi in it's own retro keyboard unit and turn it into a proper TV-computer of old. Alas I don't really have anything in the way of that kind of solder/hardware skills.

EDIT: Actually, following some of my own links, it looks like someone's beat me to it: http://www.fuze.co.uk/

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jsjohnst 3829 days ago
The second link to the docs really degrades poorly on mobile. Almost impossible to read.
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