Comment by WalterBright

Comment by WalterBright 10 hours ago

> a new BASIC interpreter for the 1983 Mattel ECS add-on for Intellivision

Fun fact: Hal Finney (yes, that Hal) wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Intellivision back in 1978 or so in a weekend. It was 2K of code. Mattel shipped it on a cartridge.

ROM space was so tight, the only error message it produced was:

EH?

Which Hal was very proud of. He showed it to me to make me laugh. At the time I was programming the Mattel Intellivision Roulette cartridge.

jacquesm 9 hours ago

That's hilarious. I wonder how many corners he cut on that. Is there a disassembly floating around somewhere?

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bitwize 8 hours ago

The Level I BASIC for the TRS-80 (which only shipped with 4 KiB of memory originally) had three error messages: WHAT? (syntax errors and the like); HOW? (illegal operations like divide by zero); and SORRY (out of memory).

BootOS, the 512-byte OS written by Oscar Toledo (author of this article), also has a single error message, "Oops".

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