Mark Fixes Stuff @markfixesstuff.com 路 Mar 14 The Jupiter Ace (1982) used Forth instead of BASIC. Would programming in schools have changed if Forth had been more widely adopted? Who preferred Forth? And WHY are these so madly expensive now? #JupiterAce #Forth #RetroComputing #80sTech
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I had exactly this conversation with David Brin who wrote "Why Johnny Can't Code" in 2006. I summarize most of my argument here: www.scidata.ca/forth-a-synt... We came within a hair's breadth of computational thinking, only to settle for 4 decades of sifting eye candy. Even BASIC would have been ok
After the company failed they were briefly available for something ridiculous like 拢25. But I was off to University and so didn鈥檛 buy one. I regret that.
My first job out of the computer games industry was coding fruit machines in Forth. I'd some prior experience with White Lightning and a HP RPN scientific calculator that saw me through college.
Reverse Polish Notation. That鈥檚 what put people off Forth.
Supposedly forth is a great language for memory-constrained platforms because interpreters are tiny
If we learned Forth in schools instead of BASIC we鈥檇 be coding in brainfuck by now.
Great post! The Jupiter Ace is a fascinating machine鈥擣orth was powerful but very different from BASIC, which likely limited its appeal for beginners. If schools had pushed Forth, we might have seen a shift towards stack-based thinking early on, but BASIC鈥檚 simplicity won out.
Fantastic keyboard, from the logo to the keys to the colors. Jupiter Ace sounds like an anime character
I and a friend from school wrote a version of Scramble for this. Sadly.... A) the terrain was pre-loaded in stack, got eaten as you progressed so to start over required re-loading from cassette (boring). B) apparently the only remaining fragments of the code are in my head now.