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Why It Matters
I started writing Thoreau BASIC because I wanted a small, old-fashioned BASIC interpreter: line numbers, immediate mode, simple graphics, strings, arrays, the sort of environment where the computer starts with a "Ready" prompt and you can immediately make it do something.
Provenance
Discovered via Hacker News and published by tarjan.itch.io.
Key Claims
Original description
I started writing Thoreau BASIC because I wanted a small, old-fashioned BASIC interpreter: line numbers, immediate mode, simple graphics, strings, arrays, the sort of environment where the computer starts with a "Ready" prompt and you can immediately make it do something. Then I wondered: why should it need an operating system? So I made it boot directly on x64 machines using UEFI. The UEFI version uses the Graphics Output Protocol for its framebuffer and gets its keyboard input directly from the firmware. There is no Windows or Linux underneath it. The machine boots into BASIC. It supports th...
Discovered via Hacker News
Community-ranked links and discussion from the HN front page.
Publisher: tarjan.itch.io
ID: 49410814 · Indexed 6 days ago