23 Jun
2025
23 Jun
'25
9:02 p.m.
On the HP9830 - I'm not sure if it was really available in 1972 (I suspect
it was announced in that year, but not for general public sale until the
following year). I say this because in the SCAMP prototype development
journals, Joe George (of IBM) doesn't mention the HP9830 until October 1973
(and in his notes, he refers to it being mentioned in "Electronic News page
31", but I've never been able to find that reference). I believe Paul
Friedl was aware of some early HP9830 concepts of prototypes (maybe in
1972), motivating him to try to incorporate the "Bathia" style printer into
their "portable computer" concept (but ended up never pulling that off --
but rather they incorporated a more functional CRT). My notes on this
are about 3/4th down on this page.
https://voidstar.blog/ibm-scamp-joe-george-notebook/
We had an operational HP9830 last year at VCF SW (with the attached
printer, it is a wonderful system). While it does "boot to BASIC", as I
recall one expansion cartridge is necessary to support some additional
keywords (like possibly the TRIG functions or some certain operations).
So it may be more fair to also consider "level of BASIC" that is being
supported (e.g. Microsoft's own 4K BASIC being quite limited, or similar
systems trying to do some form of BASIC in under 4K of ROM). My notes
about the HP9830 experience at the end of this page:
https://voidstar.blog/exploring-project-ahl-in-2024/
Someone mentioned the IBM System/3 also had a form of boot of BASIC. I
don't think it was 2 seconds of startup, as I think it did load from a disk
pack. But the disk pack could be setup to auto-load something on startup,
so you get the effect of getting to a "READY" prompt on power up.
Speaking of Microsoft BASIC's - I suppose none of the Altair offerings were
really "boot to BASIC" (maybe you could rig it to auto-load from the paper
tape). In the microcomputer domain, does the PET remain really as the
first boot to BASIC system? (and fairly full featured, with floating point
and trig functions)
-Steve
On Wed, Jun 18, 2025 at 4:19 PM Brent Hilpert via cctalk <
cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
A few weeks ago this question was raised:
On 2025 May 6, at 11:20 PM, Steve Lewis via cctalk <cctalk(a)classiccmp.org>
wrote:
Anyway, it leads to a question of what was the
first boot-to-BASIC
system?
The first to come to mind was the HP-9830, it was mentioned but seemingly
dismissed:
And tentatively I'm thinking that might have
been the Wang 2200 (but I've
no idea what the "lineage" of the Wang 2200 BASIC was). Yes, yes, there
was the HP9830 (if the BASIC ROM cartridge was inserted) - sales of both
systems seemed to have started really in ’74.
To my awareness, the 9830 was the first boot-to-BASIC-from-ROM-at-power-on
machine, or ‘BASIC appliance’. Available/announced late 1972.
(It didn’t need a 'BASIC ROM cartridge' to be inserted - BASIC in ROM was
built-in as part of the standard out-of-the-box system. Optional ROM
cartridges could be plugged-in to extend the built-in BASIC.)
However, there was a much-earlier system: As early as mid-1968 HP was
marketing single-user HP BASIC for the HP-2116 (or 2115, 2114). (This was
distinct from HP-2000 time-shared BASIC). It didn’t automatically boot,
but with 3 button-pushes you could be in the full BASIC environment
(“READY”) in less than 2 seconds from power-on. No (re-)loading required,
nor disk or tape drives, nor separate OS or executive. This was, of
course, thanks to the non-volatility of core.
This replay is late because I had to get around to conforming that the
above actually works, that is, you could repeatedly reboot the prior-loaded
interpreter across many power cycles - it didn’t alter anything after boot
that would necessitate re-loading.