I hate to be the "BBC Model B" guy :)<p>But anyway, back in the mid 80's I wrote a ton of dBase II code (using WordStar as my editor - I think it was v2), for my employer and at the time couldn't afford a full blown PC (I owned a BBC 'B') so he let me borrow a Torch Z80 co-processor which ran a variant of CP/M called CP/N. It worked like a treat. It used the Beeb's "Tube" interface that basically turned the BBC micro into an I/O device - not unlike the Commodore effort. John, now sadly gone from our mortal coil, was an official BBC/Acorn outlet, so we got to play with a lot of toys.<p>I don't remember the mechanics of getting my code to and from the office CP/M PC's at the time; even under Torch CP/N I seem to remember that BBC drives weren't compatible with real CP/M/MS-DOS PC's - I think I may have transported my code through the medium of floppy disc and used a BBC Micro in the office to squirt my code to/from via serial cable and some XModem/Kermit type of affair, which was no biggy because we already moved data between DG mini's (John was also a Data General broker) to/from PC's anyway. This was all before the joy of ethernet, though we did have a bunch of machines that ran a thing called SageNet(?) which was a kind of network. It's a long time ago, my memories are fading now :)<p>As a final tangent, we initially had a NEC PC8800 and a NEC Advanced Personal Computer - which were lovely bits of kit for their day. We eventually moved to a bunch of PC "clones" (one made by Ferranti which was a really odd thing). I have other stories, but that'll do for now.
When I was ten I got a vic 20. Do you know how old I was when I arranged my first beta testing session? I invited my brother to play a text based adventure game that drew on screen the scenery using nested if else statements. I programmed the first couple of scenes and asked him to play through them. He said it was a bit short but the idea was good. He was eight. I was still ten.<p>I have two kids now. 9 and 12. They are brighter than me. They speak swedish and English almost fluently thx to yt and since I introduced computers early in their lives they aren't scared of anything. My son started his YT channel at the age of 8. Mostly in game footage. He uses down pretty cool sw to edit his clips.<p>My daughter plays Roblox and act as everyone's go to for all questions revolving around that game.<p>Both navigate windows or Android or macos like they have inherited their knowledge from me. My kids are brighter as hell. Not one has asked me about programming.<p>I blame 8080. It's not accessible. Is it technically more advanced? Perhaps. But somewhere along the line we forgot about computing and children. Somewhere along the line we said it's no longer important for kids to learn programming. It's for adults.
He wasn't kidding when he said that the emulation is too slow to even properly register key presses in time. Booted in VirtualC64, tried to type in "dir", and it came out as "dr", and then took a pretty long time to tell me that "dr" isn't a thing.<p>I then typed in "dir" slowly, and this time it worked, but took about a minute to type out the few directory lines... character by character.<p>So, as the article suggests already, I'd really consider this to have been unusably slow even at that time. And then it suffers from the same problem as the actual Z80 CP/M cartridge, namely that the 1541 disk drive cannot read any disks that would contain CP/M stuff.<p>But as a curiosity, that all makes this just more interesting.
I always find these articles so weird. What’s next? Software to facilitate a 5 x 5 grid of people running Freiden calculators (a la Los Alamos)? I’m being snarky. In 1981 had access to a CPM system, and immediately bought a FORTRAN 4 compiler “Watfor” written at the Univ of Waterloo. A highly useful system. Wrote a program to design ring laser resonators. My first experience with “personal” computing.
I have one of those Z80 CPM cartridges for my 64. It’s a massive thing. Have never tried it. Got it in a mound of C64 stuff that came with an SX64 on Craigslist.