> Do you know what phrase I NEVER heard during those days? "What, you didn't know that?" I loved that collaborative feeling.
There was also far fewer variations of things to confound that info sharing. You had a c64, or 128, or Atari 800? You had the same everything as everyone else - same manual, same BASIC, same registers, same books available. You didn't have to worry about what version of something you had, or whether something got upgraded, or what video card you had, etc.
When there was a disagreement about something, it generally wasn't hard to at least point to a common base to start from.
The C64 Programmer's Reference Guide[1] was the game changer for me. 6510 instruction set, the computer's full memory map, register maps for all the chips, detailed information about I/O, the KERNAL, and so on. I don't recall it coming in the box, I had to save up my $$$ and actually buy the book.
Yes, and don't forget the great schematic diagram in the back! It definitely didn't come in the box with the C64; I had to save up as well. I still have my copy, tattered though it is, sitting here on my office bookshelf. That, and the book _Assembly Language Programming with the Commodore 64_ [1] changed the way I viewed computers.
Over the in the other significant English-speaking economy, we were a lot poorer in the early 1980s, and as such, anything priced in US$ was too expensive.
So things like Atari 8-bits didn't sell well here. In fact only the budget C64 did, and it was an expensive machine in early-1980s Britain.
Which was a good thing, because it encouraged a flourishing local market in locally-made computers.
Although the C64 sold in the millions, and so is familiar to many, Sinclair's ZX Spectrum was even more common over here. And although we didn't know it back then, it was huge behind the Iron Curtain too, in the form of dozens and dozens of unauthorized clones. Every Communist nation had its own ZX Spectrum clone, or maybe several. Some adapted to display Cyrillic, some built from imported bits and some from Soviet bits, some with discrete logic in place of Sinclair Research's ULA.
And all of the Euromicros had better BASICs than the C64.
Sinclair BASIC wasn't great but it did graphics and sound. The best was BBC BASIC on the BBC Micro from Acorn. Named procedures, with local variables and recursion. IF...THEN...ELSE, various loop constructs, and inline 6502 assembler.
I reckon it's partly the terrible BASIC of the C64 that turned everyone against the language:
There was also far fewer variations of things to confound that info sharing. You had a c64, or 128, or Atari 800? You had the same everything as everyone else - same manual, same BASIC, same registers, same books available. You didn't have to worry about what version of something you had, or whether something got upgraded, or what video card you had, etc.
When there was a disagreement about something, it generally wasn't hard to at least point to a common base to start from.