humanoido: If I'm not mistaken (haven't looked closely at the source) FemtoBasic is actually a port of Tiny BASIC to the Prop.
The project that taught me to program was reverse assembling Tiny BASIC. I didn't know that's what it was, it was supplied as "Edu-BASIC" for my bankruptcy-surplus Interact Model "R" which had no BASIC in ROM, so if you wanted BASIC you had to load it from cassette like a game. It was supplied with "Level II" BASIC (that left only 4 of its 16K available for your BASIC program) and "Edu-BASIC" which left 8K for your program but didn't do much. Edu-BASIC was, I would learn much later, a port of Tiny BASIC with some features added for that particular computer. Once I figured out how Edu-BASIC worked I added features to it making the Level II BASIC look pretty worthless, unless you absolutely needed floating point math. This would have all been around 1979.
Very interesting stories and history! I think the person who can verify and describe the degree of porting TINY BASIC to the Propeller chip in the form of FemtoBASIC is Mike Green. There are also comments about the TINY BASIC versions for the Propeller-based HYDRA in the documentation. (There are two versions for the HYDRA on the CD.)
I have all the issues of Byte magazine, the Mark-8 was in the first issue if I remember right. I'll look tommorrow.
I had one but sold it on Ebay a couple of year ago.
I've been reading these and just both remembering a lot of things from my childhood computing days, and looking for good ideas. There are a lot of them. Sure wish we had this kind of publication today.
Tomas Rokicki did an homage to TandyBasic in Spin. It was quite limited in capability with expressions, assignments, IF/THEN, GOTO, PRINT, and some others. I used that as the basis for FemtoBasic, added a lot of statements, and Prop-specific I/O capability.
What an amazing find! (This is what torrents were invented for)
I've got a bunch of Computer Gazzette that need this done to them.
Mike's Femtobasic is part of the reason I got hooked on the Propeller. (That and promise of a C64 emulator. I think we've got better now.)
Comments
The project that taught me to program was reverse assembling Tiny BASIC. I didn't know that's what it was, it was supplied as "Edu-BASIC" for my bankruptcy-surplus Interact Model "R" which had no BASIC in ROM, so if you wanted BASIC you had to load it from cassette like a game. It was supplied with "Level II" BASIC (that left only 4 of its 16K available for your BASIC program) and "Edu-BASIC" which left 8K for your program but didn't do much. Edu-BASIC was, I would learn much later, a port of Tiny BASIC with some features added for that particular computer. Once I figured out how Edu-BASIC worked I added features to it making the Level II BASIC look pretty worthless, unless you absolutely needed floating point math. This would have all been around 1979.
humanoido
I would love to get a copy of a manual for it.
OCM
I had one but sold it on Ebay a couple of year ago.
Here are a bunch of BYTE magazine scans. Be nice people, use the mirrors!
http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic/167235-byte-magazine/page__view__findpost__p__2067327
I've been reading these and just both remembering a lot of things from my childhood computing days, and looking for good ideas. There are a lot of them. Sure wish we had this kind of publication today.
I've got a bunch of Computer Gazzette that need this done to them.
Mike's Femtobasic is part of the reason I got hooked on the Propeller.
(That and promise of a C64 emulator. I think we've got better now.)
OBC