Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM

Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by batou on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:03AM (#9844481)

Yes the BASIC interpreter was the best thing there was on the platform. Mainly for me at least because it was heavily structured, didn't require line numbering like earlier versions and had a stupidly powerful inline assembler.

I had a 1040ST and an Amiga 500 at the time as well (spot the geek) and the software wasn't that great on those platforms either IMHO. Even PDS on DOS was nicer to program in with the 2kg pile of manuals.

The killer was the rise of the PC and you know what; I'm glad it killed everything. Perhaps controversially, a couple of years down the line and as someone who wanted to get shit done back then, things like Windows 3, VB, Word, Excel, OLE appearing were clearly the future.

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by jacquesm on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:05AM (#9844485)

I'll grant you excel.

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by Donch on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:08AM (#9844498)

*sheet

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViewSheet

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by jacquesm on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:18AM (#9844531)

Yes, sheet was pretty good. (As was word!), but Excel really had the edge there, even when it first came out.

It's the one product by MS that stood out as being best-in-class straight from day one.

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by pjc50 on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:28AM (#9844559)

.. by being a careful GUI clone of the existing successful product, Lotus 1-2-3. Right down to being largely formula-compatible and having the same hotkeys. That's why F2 is "edit current cell".

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by agumonkey on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @12:13PM (#9846342)

Excel was so nice I wrote my documents in it. I wonder how much of Microsoft was built on its fame.

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by batou on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:42AM (#9844595)

It was ok until I lost the function key strip :)

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by jacquesm on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:49AM (#9844623)

http://rayharper.co.uk/acorn/bbc_images/fn_key_strips.pdf

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by batou on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @06:51AM (#9844631)

Thanks - about 25 years too late. Plus I didn't have the Internet then! :)

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by Donch on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @07:05AM (#9844671)

Much more authentic:

https://twitter.com/bbc_micro_/status/572313372345016321

The plastic which held them in place was always broken on the school computers :-)

In all seriousness though, I personally owe a great debt to Sophie Wilson et al for building computers and software that made it very easy to start programming the second after turning a computer on; A BASIC interpreter and an Assembler available instantly from ROM. I had endless hours of fun building parallax scrolling star fields by poking directly to video RAM and slowly rendering 3d scenes in Render Bender. It was just a shame that the computers were so expensive.

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Re:Sophie Wilson, Acorn and the development of ARM by jacquesm on Tuesday July 07, 2015 @07:10AM (#9844682)

I spent about a year of savings on my 'beeb' and it was the best money I ever spent. All tricked out it cost as much as a very decent second hand car, a very large amount of money for me back then, I very much recall that I bought the drive enclosure long before I could afford the drives (I basically bought the whole thing piece-by-piece as money became available). Because I couldn't afford the drives I hacked my Sony cassette deck to function as a sort of poor-mans disk drive by connecting the buttons to the user port and the end-of-tape detector to an input pin so I could tell roughly where the head was on the tape. Really slow, especially during on-tape sorting but it worked.

A friend of mine who had rich parents got his + 2 HD drives for his birthday, I had to take the long way around but eventually got there.

Without that machine I'm pretty sure my career would have started 5 years later.

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