While I was writing my reply to Puzzler earlier, I remembered another version of Basic that I bought sometime in the 80's. At the time it was the bees knees of Basics, written as it was by Kemeny and Kurtz. It was called TrueBasic and cost me around 600 dollars to import into the UK. The language and all the libraries for it came on around 15 floppy disks. This was back in the days when a 32Mb hard drive would cost over 400 dollars. Oh, to be young and stupid again.

Ray

: While I was writing my reply to Puzzler earlier, I remembered another version of Basic that I bought sometime in the 80's. At the time it was the bees knees of Basics, written as it was by Kemeny and Kurtz. It was called TrueBasic and cost me around 600 dollars to import into the UK. The language and all the libraries for it came on around 15 floppy disks. This was back in the days when a 32Mb hard drive would cost over 400 dollars. Oh, to be young and stupid again.
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: Ray
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As I know 15 floppys is about 30Mb so where could you hold all the installation and your other programs.

And I don't know why would anybody need so many libraries for a PC in 80's, those PC was a monitor, HD, FD, sometimes a printer. Can you tell me what kind of functions was in those libraries ?

: : While I was writing my reply to Puzzler earlier, I remembered another version of Basic that I bought sometime in the 80's. At the time it was the bees knees of Basics, written as it was by Kemeny and Kurtz. It was called TrueBasic and cost me around 600 dollars to import into the UK. The language and all the libraries for it came on around 15 floppy disks. This was back in the days when a 32Mb hard drive would cost over 400 dollars. Oh, to be young and stupid again.
: :
: : Ray
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: As I know 15 floppys is about 30Mb so where could you hold all the installation and your other programs.
:
: And I don't know why would anybody need so many libraries for a PC in 80's, those PC was a monitor, HD, FD, sometimes a printer. Can you tell me what kind of functions was in those libraries ?
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15 1.44MB floppies would actually be about 22MBs, but when I used floppies in the 80's, they were ~330K apiece. That's only about 5MBs. I hadn't even heard of HDDs then...

I'm 17 years old (1984), the first computer I saw was a funny looking laptop in 1990. I don't know what was in 80's

I'm surprised this thread got ressurected. My first computer was an Amstrad 1640. Alan Sugar was the man responsible for bringing "cheap" ready built PCs to the UK. Even then, this PC, which I bought around 1986, had no internal hard drive. It did have two 5.25 floppy disk drives and an EGA monitor. The system was an 8088 processor and run at a fast 4.77Mz. It cost, along with an Epson ESC2 printer over 1,000 pounds. It came with Basic2, which was produced by Locomotive software. I even upgraded to Basic3 but there were loads of problems with it.

Over the years I took out one of the disk drives and added a low density 3.5 floppy. Later I added a 32Mb hard drive, which cost around 270 pounds, and which I had to collect from London.

You can see one of these machines at "Antique Computers" at http://www.nothingtodo.org/classiccmp/amstrad.htm

The machine was never capable of using high density floppies without a rebuild of the motherboard.

Once I'd gotten used to the machine I looked around for various other programming languages. I bought copies of Mix C, A86 assembler and TrueBasic, which came on a whole bunch of low density floppy disks.

The basic TrueBasic came on 2 floppy disks, the libraries came on a whole bunch of others. Don't forget, this was a professional development language and the libraries contained routines for sorting, higher maths, graphing, text manipulation, etc. Believe me, there was a lot of disk swapping. I bought it mainly because it was capable of producing .exe files. The libraries made it possible to concentrate on being able to write largish programs very quickly without having to write tons of code. A couple of the disk libraries were dedicated to writing the DOS dialog boxes, scroll bars etc. You could even write multi-windowed programs (obviously not multi tasking as in Windows).

The machine was given to a girlfriend after I got a secondhand Compaq 286. All the language disks I had bought were kept until I moved to the US in September 2001. The Compaq 286 was still working at the time and was sold for 5 pounds.

I'm now on just my 5th PC, a 1.4Ghz AMD all singing all dancing homemade PC, but I'm still using QBasic for fun. A pity I didn't keep those TrueBasic and Mix C language disks though.

Ray

I've just done a search for TrueBasic. The language is alive and well. The Windows Gold Edition is available for less than I paid for the DOS version. It can be seen at http://www.truebasic.com/

Ray

My first computer was also an Amstrad (Amstrad Sinclair PC 200) with a 8086 8.?? MHz cpu, with one floppy drive 3.5" 720Kb (inpossible to add anything new exept a second CPU). The computer came with GWBasic, GEM 3, Organizer.

GEM was pretty good, a sort of pre-cursor to Windows.

I've just done another search for it. The source code was released around 2 years ago. for those interested in VERY retro languages and OSs you could visit the Basic 2 and GEM site at http://www.neosplice.com/~dsbrain/gem/

Ray

: My first computer was also an Amstrad (Amstrad Sinclair PC 200) with a 8086 8.?? MHz cpu, with one floppy drive 3.5" 720Kb (inpossible to add anything new exept a second CPU). The computer came with GWBasic, GEM 3, Organizer.
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My first computer was an Osbourne 1. I STILL HAVE IT! It is still in perfect running order. It came with 2 floppy drives,and a tiny little monochrome monitor. I still have copies of the disks. Microsoft basic, CBASIC, WordStar, SuperCalc, DBASEII, an 8080 assembler, ect.

I bought it in 83.

: : : While I was writing my reply to Puzzler earlier, I remembered another version of Basic that I bought sometime in the 80's. At the time it was the bees knees of Basics, written as it was by Kemeny and Kurtz. It was called TrueBasic and cost me around 600 dollars to import into the UK. The language and all the libraries for it came on around 15 floppy disks. This was back in the days when a 32Mb hard drive would cost over 400 dollars. Oh, to be young and stupid again.
: : :
: : : Ray
: : :
: : As I know 15 floppys is about 30Mb so where could you hold all the installation and your other programs.
: :
: : And I don't know why would anybody need so many libraries for a PC in 80's, those PC was a monitor, HD, FD, sometimes a printer. Can you tell me what kind of functions was in those libraries ?
: :
:
: 15 1.44MB floppies would actually be about 22MBs, but when I used floppies in the 80's, they were ~330K apiece. That's only about 5MBs. I hadn't even heard of HDDs then...
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That would be the late 80's. I remember single density, single sided floppies. They held about 94k. I long for the good old CP/M days!