From Newsgroup: comp.sys.mac.vintage
On 2018-12-14, Your Name <
YourName@YourISP.com> wrote:
Not difficult to improve Sinclair's crappy toy "computers". Just adding
a proper keyboard would be a major improvement by itself, rather than
the disgustingly awful membrane and later rubberised keyboards those
useless things came with. Next up would be a proper operating system
and programming system, rather than the hopeless "press five keys to
get the keyword 'If'" that Sinclairt stupidly forced users to program
with.
As anything else, they were designed according to the brief they
were given. The keyboards on the earlier models were cost saving
measures to hit a desired price point. Yes, you can argue about
the soundness of that decision but it didn't come from nowhere.
The BBC had a nice keyboard but was also three times the price.
By the time the QL/Spectrum+ were out the moulded keyboards were
actually quite usable as well as being almost completely impervious
to staples, breadcrumbs etc simply because the keys were so close
fitting. This is something Apple still can't get right almost 40
years later with their current Macbooks.
For for the extended keyboard symbols, again that was a design
choice and in my view an elegant one - the BASIC interpreter
essentially compiled down to byte code as you entered the program.
That provided a few tangible benefits: execution speed was greatly
enhanced, syntax checking was as you typed, and it saved a lot of
memory, e.g. an entire keyword used only a single byte. With 48K
memory available to BASIC (ISTR the C64 was limited to 32K if you
coded in BASIC) that allowed for more sophisticated programs.
But even with massive improvements, those things would still be utterly useless and nothing more than toys.
Oddly enough it's probably less than ten years since I last saw a
Spectrum used for a real task: they got used for all sorts of
specilised applications, in part because of that edge connector on
the back and how easy it was to interface to for even non-trivial
jobs. That last one I recal seeing was controlling a model railway
layout at an exhibition, like so many others with a selfbuilt
wirewrapped contraption hanging off the back actually interfacing
to the layout. It looked quite nice actually as far as I remember,
you had a kid of virtual signal box on screen with indication of
signal settings and where the trains were. It's be difficult to
do soemthing of that complexity with the kind of parallel port
abuse that was common on the PC even 15 years later.
OTOH I don't think I've seen a C64 outside of a retro context this
millenium.
--
Andrew Smallshaw
andrews@sdf.org
--- Synchronet 3.17a-Linux NewsLink 1.110
