IMHO Commodore was right to kill the C65 when they were already making the Amiga 1000. The end of all the 8-bit systems was pretty obvious by '89, when rumors of the c65 started going around - the Mac had been out for five years, the Amiga and Atari ST for four. It would have suffered a fate almost as ignominious as the Sega Saturn.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_65
2: https://www.c256foenix.com/forum/the-specifications/early-sp...
The Amiga would have been more responsive and really just as powerful with the same custom chipset tied to something like a 65816 clocked at 8mhz. Would have been able to address just as much RAM but would have higher interrupt responsiveness, and Commodore could have made use of its existing 6502 expertise, thrown in a couple SID chips, and maybe even a VICII for C64 portability. What a machine that would have been!
Likewise, I think Tramiel could have done something similar instead of diving down the 68000 path with the Atari ST. They could have improved on the excellent Jay Miner designed A8 chipset but tied it to something like the 816, which was just coming out in 84 when they started the ST project.
Just some fantasy alternative history :-)
The Atari ST was built from scratch in less than 8 months after the deal to license the Amiga chipset fell trouhg. The ST is an amazing engineering feat considering the insane schedule.
I agree on you that the 68k is a terrible CPU for gaming, but it got better when there was some cache added to it, starting with the 68030.
I had an Acorn Archimedes with an ARM 2 clocked 8 Mhz (the same speed as the Atari ST, and 1 Mhz faster than the Amiga 1000/500), it was so much faster than my ST.
You may be overstating the death of the 68000... the 68060 was introduced in 1994, and I remember doing embedded work on 68000 based designs in 1999-2000. (In fact, some of the processors are still available, although not recommended for new designs.)
What was the problem with Amiga responsiveness? Never heard about this. Interrupt response? What?
For several years, it had the best games. The bitplane-based graphics system became a hindrance with FPS-games but that was never about the CPU.
Two different computer from 2 different visions...
My take on it, in a nutshell, is really to come up with a bridge in between the C128 and the Amiga500... With the design restriction of the time. At least as much as I can with the resources I have. I won't go about creating a new mold... Cheers!
While it might not have been as easy to see /in/ '89 in hindsight the seeds for the rise (and crowding out of other architectures) of the Intel x86 chips were already well sown and growing rapidly by then:
i386: released Oct 1985 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386)
i486: released April 1989 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80486)
And the consensus was, probably it would have looked like the Acorn Archimedes. Acorn really got it right, and they got it right shockingly early.
I'm going to steal that phrasing.
I know this comes up a bit too often on HN but it's pretty, um, glaring, in this case.
Naïvely, I would assume that something like Forth or Occam would be much better for this, and both are also age-appropriate.
Not even close.
BASIC was a very powerful language. Not "powerful" in the way we think of languages today with OOP and all that, but powerful in its flexibility. Each machine had its own version of BASIC that made the most of each machine's unique capabilities.
Games were probably the minority of BASIC programs. BASIC was a serious language for serious business programs, especially in sales and accounting.
If your needs were scientific, you went with FORTRAN. If you were needs were hardcore business, you went with COBOL. If your needs were academic, there was Lisp and a bunch of others. But BASIC was the common language that almost every computer had available.
Huge companies managed inventory with BASIC. Transit timetables were calculated in BASIC. Machine control, non-mainframe astronomy, specialized journalism applications, record-keeping, and dozens of other needs were handled well by programs written in BASIC.
The first program I ever sold commercially was essentially a single-user Salesforce for the Commodore 64 tailored for limousine companies. I wrote it in BASIC.
If you think BASIC was only used for games, that's a reflection of your limited experience, not of the limitations of BASIC.
Seriously, there was no support for what made the C64 the C64 in the C64 BASIC! You wanted grpahics? PEEK and POKE. Sound? PEEK and POKE.
You might not know that is where Microsoft made its initial $
That's the book I learned to program from, a compilation of games in BASIC published in 1973. I don't know the truth of the GP's claim but reportedly that book was very influential so there might be something to it.
(I didn't downvote you, and I have upvoted your post.)
I learned c on my c64, in fact. a skill I still use 32 years later.
you can download the manual courtesy of archive.org: https://archive.org/details/Super-C_1986_Abacus
It didn't support then entire K&R standard though. No function pointers.
BASIC had a couple huge advantages in that it ran in minimal memory and had a reasonable infix syntax. The infix syntax was a particular advantage in educational scenarios where it matched (roughly) with the way math was taught. (Which was never in pre or postfix notation.)
The cross-platform nature of BASIC was also useful. If you knew one microcomputer, it made it more likely that you could sit down at another and get it to do useful things.
It's easy to second-guess, but even in hindsight I think BASIC was a reasonable choice for the time, goals, and hardware limitations.
Also, Occam?! That is a concurrent programming language... I'm not sure it would have done too well on the machines of the day.
