[Nevermark]

Your sidebar reminds me of the computer I learned to program on. A TRS-80 Model III.

I went through a short period of figuring out interesting peek/poke memory addresses for modifying the BASIC system, and found the "80" used as the scroll width. Setting that to 60 allowed me to create a non-scrolling status sidebar like that for my first programs/games.

It strikes me that it would have been great to have had a Forth machine back then. That early version of BASIC didn't have a (language accessible) stack! Not even a return address stack, aka GOSUB. So I used strings as a stack to implement a small text adventure parser. (And later, on a computer with graphics pixels, I used BASIC strings as a heap for defining and drawing simple 3D vector objects.) Then I learned Pascal.

Desperate times. Desperate measures. But Forth would have been great.