[jamiek88]

Once I got good at typing on it my Acorn Electron (we couldn’t afford the whizzy bbc master!) was an extension of my brain.

Instant response. A full reboot was a control break away. Instant access to the interpreter. Easy assembly access.

I thought, it executed.

I remember our school moving from the networked bbc’s to the PC’s and it was a huge downgrade for us as kids. Computer class became operating a word processor or learning win 3.11 rather than the exciting and sometimes adversarial (remote messaging other terminals, spoofing etc) system that made us want to learn, to just more drudgery.

[snoot]

I agree with all of this except for one point:

Having an ordinary key on the keyboard that would effectively kill -9 the current program and clear the screen was a crazy design decision, especially for a machine where saving data meant using a cassette tape!

[jamiek88]

The break key unless you held down control was only a soft break though.

Your program would still be in memory with an \>OLD command.

As long as it was a basic prog, the machine code loaded *RUN was lost and had to be reloaded from tape, yes.

A pain for games but I don’t really recall accidentally pressing the break key much it was out of the way up right.

I could talk about this all day!

[snoot]

It’s true that you could get a basic program back with old.

But any data was lost and I saw break get pressed accidentally fairly often at school and amongst friends.

[jamiek88]

Fair. Not everyone spent 12 hours per day on their computer like me! They probably had friends and stuff. :)