I missed the basic era by a little but I always wonder why the BASIC roms never became the shell of the disk operating system when disks entered the pictured. Think analogous to the unix shell which is both the interactive command line and a scripting language. Get rid of the line numbers, add some directory access commands (list, mkdir, cd etc) and you would have a pretty good cli. but nobody appears to have done this. Instead you ended up with things cp/m and dos. fine enough I guess but their command interpreter sort of sucks in comparison to what basic could have brought to the table. And basic was already there.
michalpleban•1h ago
They sort of did this with BASIC 4.0 and later for Commodores. We had CATALOG for listing files, SCRATCH for deleting them, HEADER for formatting and so forth. These were standard BASIC commands, and could be used in programs as well as directly.
steve1977•1h ago
Yup, this basically what you booted into on a C64 for example.
anyfoo•21m ago
No, that was BASIC 2.0, and using any DOS commands was extremely awkward.
With the notable exception of listing the directory, which was pretty easy through a trick from the disk drive’s DOS which meant you could load the disk directory “as a program” with a special name, “$”, and then just LIST it. But you see, the drive’s DOS had to sort of go out of its way to make that simple.
kid64•3m ago
That's not a trick. It's just how you list files. Same awkwardness as any other disk command.
hakfoo•41m ago
There was sort of a conceptual firewall between "using the computer" and "programming the computer" for a lot of systems.
Some (various LISP and Smalltalk environments) had a much narrower wall between the two, but I could see the case for being able to say "Your secretary never has to know about programming" even if it left flexibility and value on the table.
somat•2d ago
michalpleban•1h ago
steve1977•1h ago
anyfoo•21m ago
With the notable exception of listing the directory, which was pretty easy through a trick from the disk drive’s DOS which meant you could load the disk directory “as a program” with a special name, “$”, and then just LIST it. But you see, the drive’s DOS had to sort of go out of its way to make that simple.
kid64•3m ago
hakfoo•41m ago
Some (various LISP and Smalltalk environments) had a much narrower wall between the two, but I could see the case for being able to say "Your secretary never has to know about programming" even if it left flexibility and value on the table.