Yup. Built in BASIC was the norm for all those late 70s / early 80s machines. Didn't the first couple of IBM PC models have a cut down ROM BASIC?
It's apparently popular to disrespect BASIC now that we have gigahertz 64-bit machines with gigabytes of RAM and terabyte solid state drives on our desktops. But when you think about what you could do on a 6502 machine with a frigging 256 byte stack... hella props for the folk that made that work.
But yeah... I think by the mid 80s, most people really just wanted to run a few games, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet. The idea computer buyers may want to write their own code was fading fast.
HyperCard had one or two warts, but it was definitely functional and you could do a lot with a small amount of effort. Also... the way you learned it seemed very exploratory. You had to learn a few basics, but after that it was hard-core experimentation and remixing. I bought an old PowerBook 160 recently explicitly to run MPW and HyperCard. Mostly to remember what the old world was like.
I think the experimentation is what we've lost and miss but can't explain.
Imagine an alternate world where people tinkered in HyperCard and eventually the code evolved to be network-aware, and we all wrote in HyperTalk and not HTML. And then that became the web. I think Atkinson even acknowledges that this was a huge missed opportunity.
It's apparently popular to disrespect BASIC now that we have gigahertz 64-bit machines with gigabytes of RAM and terabyte solid state drives on our desktops. But when you think about what you could do on a 6502 machine with a frigging 256 byte stack... hella props for the folk that made that work.
But yeah... I think by the mid 80s, most people really just wanted to run a few games, a word processor and maybe a spreadsheet. The idea computer buyers may want to write their own code was fading fast.
HyperCard had one or two warts, but it was definitely functional and you could do a lot with a small amount of effort. Also... the way you learned it seemed very exploratory. You had to learn a few basics, but after that it was hard-core experimentation and remixing. I bought an old PowerBook 160 recently explicitly to run MPW and HyperCard. Mostly to remember what the old world was like.