Bang! Immediately whole areas of complexity relating to concurrency are gone. While you could write for a multi-user timesharing system like UNIX on the PDP-11, the common home computing target was:
- boot instantly from ROM
- small API (of necessity)
- fixed API: no need to worry about updates if you can't update
- shallow API over the hardware
- hardware itself fairly simple: just write directly to framebuffer
- zero information security considerations
You didn't have to worry about updates, dependencies, compatibility polyfills, etc. This limited what you could do, but perhaps not to such a great extent as it might appear.
On the other hand, information was a problem. If something wasn't in the manual, you either had to reverse-engineer it, or buy or borrow a huge thick expensive non-searchable book and hope it had the information you needed.
(I have a pipedream project of "BASIC for the web", if I ever flesh it out it'll get posted to HN)
So many of the modern problems are because the computer is a battleground, both in the infosec sense and the market dominance sense.
(I have a pipedream project of "BASIC for the web", if I ever flesh it out it'll get posted to HN)
Back in the late 90s when my IDE was “what I can get on a MacFormat cover CD”, I started using what was then called REALbasic. It was very similar to Visual Basic, even sharing most syntax with whatever version my 6th form insisted we used. Over time it added more compilation targets and changed its name to Xojo, and judging by their website it now supports websites as a compile target.
Comments
The set of things you had to worry about is just .. different. My ancient programmer credentials from 1996: https://github.com/pjc50/ancient-3d-for-turboc
Back in the day, you had:
- single processor
- not networked
Bang! Immediately whole areas of complexity relating to concurrency are gone. While you could write for a multi-user timesharing system like UNIX on the PDP-11, the common home computing target was:
- boot instantly from ROM
- small API (of necessity)
- fixed API: no need to worry about updates if you can't update
- shallow API over the hardware
- hardware itself fairly simple: just write directly to framebuffer
- zero information security considerations
You didn't have to worry about updates, dependencies, compatibility polyfills, etc. This limited what you could do, but perhaps not to such a great extent as it might appear.
On the other hand, information was a problem. If something wasn't in the manual, you either had to reverse-engineer it, or buy or borrow a huge thick expensive non-searchable book and hope it had the information you needed.
(I have a pipedream project of "BASIC for the web", if I ever flesh it out it'll get posted to HN)
So many of the modern problems are because the computer is a battleground, both in the infosec sense and the market dominance sense.
Back in the late 90s when my IDE was “what I can get on a MacFormat cover CD”, I started using what was then called REALbasic. It was very similar to Visual Basic, even sharing most syntax with whatever version my 6th form insisted we used. Over time it added more compilation targets and changed its name to Xojo, and judging by their website it now supports websites as a compile target.