[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. :)