Rumor has it that Paul Koning may have mentioned these words:
>If that's what you mean, then the answer is no, not by many decades.
>Unix boxes pretty much uniformly come with all that. BASIC systems
>always had it, as did LISP boxes, or FORTH systems. All that goes
>back to the 1970s if not before. And of course, any large machine
>(timesharing or batch) has always had all this stuff as a matter of
>course. The closest you might come is that some of these systems
>would offer some languages standard, and some as extra cost options.
>
>Developer's kits are largely a PC invention, I would say.
I wouldn't -- if you wanted to develop in a program that didn't already
come with the machine. There were developer kits for COBOL, Pascal, etc.
for OS-9 on the CoCos (heck, Basic09 didn't even come with it initially
($99 option) - not until OS-9 Level II for the CoCo3 was it standard)...
However, I'd say that most early computers came with one built-in language
standard so you could actually *do* something with the computer... nowadays
that's no longer true.[1]
Heck, even IBM made sure that some form of BASIC or APL was included with
their early OSs... Did OS/2 come with a BASIC? I think they're a Micro$oft
conspiracy... You by an OS, then you have to buy something else so you can
actually *do* something with the OS...
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
[1] and it sucks, too! Like it would've been hard to include a basic BASIC
on the palm. Instead, it does nothing but keep notes & numbers...
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch_at_30below.com
What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????
Received on Tue Sep 28 2004 - 17:57:00 BST