🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <22...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca> pet...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) writes:
>In article <35...@cc.usu.edu>, SL...@cc.usu.edu (Roger Ivie) writes:
>> 
>> Sorry, I can't resist any longer. Whenever this thread comes along, I just
>> *have* to mention TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC, which had only three
>> error messages: What? (syntax error) How? (divide by zero, etc.) and Sorry!
>> (out of memory, etc.)
>
>
>I remember a diferrent one which you got when you ran out
>of memory - "OM" Sort of like it started humming its
>mantra, but it meant "Out of Memory". The other was the
>one I regularly got just as you finished typing in 15k of Basic
>code for some neat little hack (and just before you saved
>it to cassette tape).  My brother who shift in his seat,
>kick the power cord and we'd get "MEM SIZE?" This became
>my default expression to indicate that I'm very confused
>and need to reset myself. Of course, all work is lost and
>you try again...
>
>				- peterd

That was TRS-80 level *2* BASIC.  You see, originally Radio Shack decided
that people wouldn't want to spend lots of money on the computer, so 
they planned to sell a lot of minimum models.  (The second production run
was planned to approximately equal the number of Radio Shack stores in
existence, so that they could use it for inventory or something - the
Shack really had no confidence that this was going to fly!)  So, to save
money, they provided lots of 4K ROM systems (Level 1 BASIC) and also
ordered some 12K ROM systems (Level 2 BASIC).  When I got my machine,
I had to wait months for the level 2 ROMs, and got fairly good with the
level 1 stuff.

That BASIC had the three error messages mentioned; "MEMORY SIZE?" belonged
to the level 2 system ("MEM SIZE?" was a later change when they were trying
to save memory space; I suppose an extra three bytes helped a little :-)
and was the standard startup question.  The idea was that you might want to
reserve some of high memory for machine-language subroutines, and if so
you needed to do this before BASIC got set up.

Anyway, one nice thing that Level 1 BASIC would do with the error was
print the offending line with a question mark where the error occurred.
This was missing in Level 2 BASIC, which caused some problems when
trying to debug a one-line program.  (A magazine called _SoftSide_ or
something similar kept printing one-line programs.  One of them even
ran a video game that kept score!)

DHT