[Edu-sig] BASIC?

[Kevin Driscoll]

> There's been no loss or leakage of any kind from an engineering point
> of view.  What leaked away, apparently, was any brains in the math
> teaching sector.  Mostly bozos over there.


The PCjr shipped with beautiful fold-out schematics of every part.  It
booted into cartridge BASIC.

Did the Macintosh ship with Hypercard?

I believe that even Windows 98 shipped with QBasic and a copy of gorilla.bas.

A Dell desktop in 2006 comes without any programming tools. (Unless
DOS batch support counts.)


There are more free tools available online than ever but it seems that
PC design continues to move toward appliance status.  (See: Trusted
Computing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_computing )  I consider
that a loss!

Kevin