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.
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.