I bought one of these 2nd hand in early nineties after being introduced to the RPN way of doing things with a Hewlett Packard 28S calculator. Had fun with this machine although it was similar in many respects to ZX81 (and supposedly Spectrum) I grew up with.
The soft- and hardware had similar issues. For a meaningful programs in both cases you would quickly need to descend to machine code, which on both systems was very enjoyable experience. (E.g. BBC micro had far more mature software stack.)
But you are probably right in implying that Forth probably was too alien to ever gain mass adoption, even if the soft and hardware would have been superior to more common BASIC alternative.
Comments
I bought one of these 2nd hand in early nineties after being introduced to the RPN way of doing things with a Hewlett Packard 28S calculator. Had fun with this machine although it was similar in many respects to ZX81 (and supposedly Spectrum) I grew up with.
The soft- and hardware had similar issues. For a meaningful programs in both cases you would quickly need to descend to machine code, which on both systems was very enjoyable experience. (E.g. BBC micro had far more mature software stack.)
But you are probably right in implying that Forth probably was too alien to ever gain mass adoption, even if the soft and hardware would have been superior to more common BASIC alternative.