I was shocked to see the TI-99/4a so high up. Just listing a BASIC program on a TI-99 is about as slow as a 300 baud modem.

Example: https://youtu.be/ls-PxqRQ35Q?t=178

Once I got good at typing on it my Acorn Electron (we couldn’t afford the whizzy bbc master!) was an extension of my brain.

Instant response. A full reboot was a control break away. Instant access to the interpreter. Easy assembly access.

I thought, it executed.

I remember our school moving from the networked bbc’s to the PC’s and it was a huge downgrade for us as kids. Computer class became operating a word processor or learning win 3.11 rather than the exciting and sometimes adversarial (remote messaging other terminals, spoofing etc) system that made us want to learn, to just more drudgery.

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!

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!

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.

Fair. Not everyone spent 12 hours per day on their computer like me! They probably had friends and stuff. :)