IBM ROM BASIC or lack thereof

From: Sean 'Captain Napalm' Conner <spc_at_conman.org>
Date: Tue Oct 2 18:19:31 2001

It was thus said that the Great Glen Goodwin once stated:
>
> Tony Duell wrote:
>
> > Since they never did provide BASIC they had to make INT 18 do something
> > (remember an application program could, in theory, call that interrupt).
> > Since that interrupt should have entered ROM BASIC, the most sensible
> > thing to do was to print that there was no ROM BASIC and then halt the
> > CPU.
>
> Since "they never did provide BASIC" then there was *always* "no ROM
> BASIC." That's like stopping the machine with a message stating "no
> printer." Why not display something understandable to a common user, such
> as "no bootable device?"

  INT 18h on the Data General/1 (an 8088 based laptop computer, from 1984)
would dump you into a built in application that included a terminal program
(ADM-3A if I recall correctly, and which I used extensively when I traveled
because the serial ports were based off the USART 82C51, and thus not
compatible with the general 8250s in use on other PCs, so I couldn't use
programs like Procomm or Qmodem), a word processor and maybe some other
cheesey programs like that.

  -spc (And it's a common (programming) mistake to assume that INT 19H
        will reboot the machine ... )
Received on Tue Oct 02 2001 - 18:19:31 BST