[nylug-talk] LSB/FHS filesystem silliness, developer silliness

[Ajai Khattri]

On Wed, 6 Dec 2006, wdg3rd at comcast.net wrote:

> Yeah, you better smile when you use that nickname, son.  Nobody in Fort 
> Worth realized how the initials of Tandy/Radio Shack would be abused by 
> those who bought inferior machines with crappy 6502 CPUs.

Firstly, there were no 6809-based micros in the UK (apart from the 
short-lived Dragon 32 and the already-mentioned Trash 80).

Secondly, the 6502-based Acorn BBC had better software than almost all 
other 8bits at the time (BBC BASIC had named procedures, recursion and a 
built-in assembler allowing you to mix BASIC and assembly language). I cut 
my teeth on the 6502 assembler before moving on to the Z80, 68000 
("wow. I dont have to write that multiply subroutine anymore?!") and 
8086 CPUs. You could also add a second slave ("co-processor") Z80 or 65C02 to 
the ole Beeb and run stuff from additional ROMs (instant reboot between 
CPU environments is still quite impressive).

Then there's the old story about how Bill Gates tried to sell MS BASIC to 
Acorn which they decided would be going backwards from what they had 
already written in-house...

People seem to forget that software is more important than hardware.


-- 
Aj. (ajai at bitblit.net)