What was remarkable of the computer market of the 1980s was not only the diversity of machines and hardware solutions, but also the diversity of programming languages in general use.
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I was young but remember a diversity of operating systems I don't see today. They weren't cut-and-paste. Each OS was for one machine only.
@amoroso The cambrian explosion of computer languages happened in the 1970s, and we kind of converged so quickly in the 90s on C++ as The Only Language That Matters Any More, Shut Up Perl etc. It's really only in the past decade that we've had the perspective to look back and think "oh wow, so all those esoteric new languages from the 21st century really are just trying to breathe new life into that potential!"
@spacehobo I'm glad we got to taste that explosion.
@amoroso Aye, Basic, Basic, Basic, oo Forth! Basic... 😉 (just pulling your leg, i'm sure there were probably others too - they were just drowned out by Basic 😁 )
@rasur And Pascal, and Lisp, and Fortran, and Smalltalk, and Modula-2, and... 😀
@amoroso admittedly mine is the english experience.. all those (IMO much better) languages weren't really available to teenage me, mainly due to cost - but i'm enjoying them now though (esp lisp & smalltalk.. god how I wish i'd had a smalltalk system back then!)
