What is the best BASIC Pocket Computer

[Howard Owen]

(03-30-2014 07:29 PM)Garth Wilson Wrote:  I have never seen such a good BASIC, even when I was working with Rocky Mountain BASIC 5.1 at work which was a huge disappointment compared to the 71 with math module and a bunch of LEX files from the Paris users' group.

Off topic:

Wow, I thought RMB was the best thing ever coming from mbasic on CP/M. I was struck by the elements it shared with Pascal and FORTRAN. It was also extendable with Pascal or 68K assembler. I loved the "knob" on the Nimitz keyboard too. But I was most impressed with its I/O capability. We were typically collecting data from radio navigation and bathymetry, plotting a fix and graphing and logging that in real-time, all on a 9816 with 256K. We also interfaced with a menagerie of other marine instrument systems, from pingers to sidescan to LORAN and on and on. HP71B BASIC was and is a wonderful handheld BASIC, but it can't do any of that stuff.

It was a fun start to my professional career. "Offshore Programmer" was not a typical job title.