+OLD CS1 Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 (edited) Okay, the TI BASIC page at Wikipedia has a bad, bad "screen shot" of TI BASIC. Does anyone here have an account to fix this? I have attached a "real" screen shot representing what the original supplier attempted. Suffice to say I do not, and you apparently cannot upload anonymous images. (Probably for good reason.) TI BASIC (TI 99/4A) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI_BASIC_(TI_99/4A) Edited February 21, 2011 by OLD CS1 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matthew180 Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 Done. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 21, 2011 Author Share Posted February 21, 2011 You rock. Thank you, sir. /thread Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unhuman Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 What was the bad one? It was fixed before I could see the damages! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matthew180 Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 It is a Wiki, so you can see all the old versions of a page. At the top of the article select "View History", then select the link for the version just before my edit. My edit is on top, so the one you want is second in the list and looks like this: (cur | prev) 00:00, 19 December 2010 Hyperbowlingball (talk | contribs) (5,052 bytes) (undo) The date part is a link, select it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 Oddly, the TI BASIC article seems to be locked? I don't get an edit link when I look at it (though I do for the main TI page). Surprised they accepted articles on various BASIC dialects as "notable". An important but absent point in this article is that TI BASIC was strictly ANSI compliant, and not 100% compatible with Microsoft BASIC, which was actually the more common dialect of the day. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unhuman Posted February 21, 2011 Share Posted February 21, 2011 (edited) It is a Wiki, so you can see all the old versions of a page. At the top of the article select "View History", then select the link for the version just before my edit. My edit is on top, so the one you want is second in the list and looks like this: (cur | prev) 00:00, 19 December 2010 Hyperbowlingball (talk | contribs) (5,052 bytes) (undo) The date part is a link, select it. Wow. That was one screwed up image... Edited February 21, 2011 by unhuman Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 21, 2011 Author Share Posted February 21, 2011 (edited) Wow. That was one screwed up image... Yup. I shuddered when I saw it, and could not believe the submitter called it a screen shot. Edited February 21, 2011 by OLD CS1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 21, 2011 Author Share Posted February 21, 2011 Oddly, the TI BASIC article seems to be locked? I don't get an edit link when I look at it (though I do for the main TI page). Interesting. It was freely editable yesterday and this morning. I wonder if an article gets locked for a while after any change, like the picture. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
matthew180 Posted February 22, 2011 Share Posted February 22, 2011 An important but absent point in this article is that TI BASIC was strictly ANSI compliant, and not 100% compatible with Microsoft BASIC, which was actually the more common dialect of the day. That is strange, since Microsoft wrote TI-BASIC... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted February 22, 2011 Share Posted February 22, 2011 (edited) An important but absent point in this article is that TI BASIC was strictly ANSI compliant, and not 100% compatible with Microsoft BASIC, which was actually the more common dialect of the day. That is strange, since Microsoft wrote TI-BASIC... According to the biography "Gates", Bill Gates himself tried to persuade TI to use Microsoft BASIC like everyone else, but at that point he was just a kid going up against a huge corporation that knew exactly what it wanted and had Texan gall to back it. Sadly, I wish we did have Microsoft BASIC on the TI console. We could have done a lot more with an unexpanded machine. (edit: here's a link to the excerpt from the book I posted to the Yahoo group in 2005: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/ti99-4a/message/38505) Edited February 22, 2011 by Tursi Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+OLD CS1 Posted February 22, 2011 Author Share Posted February 22, 2011 Sadly, I wish we did have Microsoft BASIC on the TI console. We could have done a lot more with an unexpanded machine. A truer statement is infrequently uttered. Buggy as it may have been, I had much better BASIC experiences on the Commodore 64 and to some degree on the Apple ][ (for that matter, Atari BASIC was not all bad, either.) All said, I much preferred BASIC 2.0 over Applesoft, even with the limitations which were later addressed by BASIC 3.5 and 7.0. I can only imagine the experience of a fast BASIC on the TI console with features like *gasp* disk management without special cartridges, graphics modes, direct memory access, and so on. I assume someone has a 99/8 to show off at the Faire. If I do make it this year, I would like to see what an un-crippled TI-99 machine might have been like. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted February 22, 2011 Share Posted February 22, 2011 Even if we didn't get the speed or any of the other parts (since it sounds like we probably would not have, the book talks about how Microsoft wrote a simulator to develop under -- I still have suspicions that simulator because GPL, but I can't find much for or against that theory). But even without that, with POKE and CALL we still could have done a lot of things, even in just 256 bytes of scratchpad Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unhuman Posted February 22, 2011 Share Posted February 22, 2011 Well - Maybe we could email Mr. Gates and ask him to write it in an afternoon for us... Sort of a philanthropy, you know... The one thing though - I wonder if it occurred - if the BASIC provided would've had the powerful (and slow) functions we have today. Nobody else had easy graphics + sound. An important but absent point in this article is that TI BASIC was strictly ANSI compliant, and not 100% compatible with Microsoft BASIC, which was actually the more common dialect of the day. That is strange, since Microsoft wrote TI-BASIC... According to the biography "Gates", Bill Gates himself tried to persuade TI to use Microsoft BASIC like everyone else, but at that point he was just a kid going up against a huge corporation that knew exactly what it wanted and had Texan gall to back it. Sadly, I wish we did have Microsoft BASIC on the TI console. We could have done a lot more with an unexpanded machine. (edit: here's a link to the excerpt from the book I posted to the Yahoo group in 2005: http://tech.groups.y.../message/38505) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tursi Posted February 23, 2011 Share Posted February 23, 2011 Yeah, it's a tough call. The answer would probably be no, since MS made their money at that time with fast ports of their existing BASIC. That said, I'd rather have had the ability to tweak the machine... honestly I wouldn't have cared whether it was POKE or CALL POKE, but leaving it out always miffed me. Not really much to be done for it now. If I knew the machine as well as I do now, I could have dropped a cartridge with CALL POKE in (but if I could have built a cartridge, I'd already have been off TI BASIC, I guess...) 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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