My first computer I could swear I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find it, so it must’ve never escaped Twitter

I’m tempted to go find and buy one of these, partly for the nostalgia and partly to see how much I can convince a baby BASIC to do. Mine might even still be in my parents’ attic, if they haven’t thrown it out by now.

• I’m tempted to go find and buy one of these, partly for the nostalgia and partly to see how much I can convince a baby BASIC to do. Mine might even still be in my parents’ attic, if they haven’t thrown it out by now.
• While I resist the urge to scour ebay, let’s move on a year or two.

Addended interlude: the manual

• Aha, a commenter has found a post with a scan of the BASIC part of the manual (at the bottom)! There are a lot of gems in here I’d forgotten about, like how switching to BASIC mode would automatically turn Caps Lock on (something I remember hating, even as a kid). I also fondly remember the goofy proportional font they used, even for code, that used a ∅-like glyph for zero. I even spotted a missing semicolon in some example code that I could swear I’d noticed before.
• I’m surprised to learn that there is some semblance of debugging available, though I doubt I understood it at the time — you could add a STOP statement to a program and it will halt there, returning you to the default REPL, where you could presumably print out variables or change lines of the running program.