Ancient History
From a Guardian story on the 25th anniversary of Elite:
Taken together, the operating system and BASIC gave you everything you needed to write and run your own little programs. But the computer contained no word processor, no bells and whistles, no array of applications waiting for you to play with them, no instant pleasurable pay-off for buying a new computer. When you turned on the Atom or the BBC Micro, the ROM chip booted up its two pieces of cargo and on your television screen appeared this:
BASIC >
and nothing else. The machine did nothing else, unless you made it.
My first computer, an Atari 800XL, was a more powerful machine than the Acorn, but not much more powerful. And it greeted you with exactly the same spartan prompt when you turned it on — although it said Ready, instead of BASIC, which was just as cryptic but maybe a little friendlier.
But it didn’t matter. At all. That computer was the most amazing thing I’d ever owned, and I spend hours exploring the simultaneously narrow and infinite possibilities it offered. At one point, before I got an actual word processor (the First XLEnt Word Processor, to be precise) I just typed out documents on that empty white-on-blue prompt screen, laboriously formatting everything so that it fit. There was no way of saving what I’d written, or printing it, or doing anything at all with it except watching it all disappear when I turned the computer off.
It didn’t matter. It was — and is — one of the most thrilling things I’d ever done. My long career with computers has been, in some sense, an effort to recapture that breathless sense of wonder and possibility.
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