4 May
2025
4 May
'25
8:59 p.m.
On Sun, May 4, 2025 at 12:43 PM Steve Lewis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
I just had the impression Wang was doing some early
form of this,
as they referred to their BASIC as "hard-wired." Or in other words, you
can't point to a single chip and say "there is the Wang BASIC ROM" (but
I'm
speculating, hence the question to try to clarify on their pre-1974 systems)
It seems to just be 16K BASIC in ROM as far as I can see.
They describe it as MICROCODE and the Wikipedia article talks about
how the microcode implemented the instructions for BASIC thus
providing an abstraction layer that later allowed replacing the native
hardware underneath while retaining compatibility. But then that's
what any BASIC interpreter does really isn't it?
From their 1974 ad (image in the Wikipedia article) they say "...you
get a CPU with 16K bytes of BASIC language instructions hardwired into
the electronics" then in the next paragraph "The hardwired MOS ROM
language..." so honestly, I don't see how any of this is any different
than a conventional microcomputer with BASIC in ROM.
I think the rest is just awkward market-speak because what they are
describing hadn't really been done before so the terminology was still
up in the air as to what to call it. If they released it five years
later, they would probably just have said "computer with 16K BASIC in
ROM" because that's what it is.