Not really. The emerged from different spaces. But both rely heavily on line-level editing, each for their own reason. For ed I can really recommend a great video by Kay Lack [1]. For Basic playing around with the Sunflower interpreter [2] and for context this paper by Annette Vee [3] on Dartmouth Basic.
Both, ed and Basic, had to deal with constraints in terms of how much could be shown on screen or printed. So 'screen estate' was limited and one way to deal with that is to focus on just on single lines. In both you hardly ever see the whole code file at once (let alone be able to mavigate around the file quickly on a visual level), but it still resides in memory. You just ask the program to show you certain lines. In ed with `2,4p` or `2,4n` to print lines 2-4 without and with line numbers. In Basic with `LIST 20 30` to show lines 20 and 30. The same for editing. You simply let ed or Basic know which lines to overwrite or edit, without moving there by mouse or keyboard visually.
Kay Lack's video made me realise to what extreme these constraints went, when you have no screen but just a printer.
[1] https://www.0de5.net/stimuli/the-little-editor-that-could
[2] https://hundredrabbits.itch.io/sunflower-basic
[3] https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/17/2/000696/000696.html
Just published as book and #OpenAccess PDF:
https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7115-5/computerwohnen/
... with a chapter from me about the question "What is a home computer?".
#MediaArchaeology #ComputerArchaeology #ComputerHistory #MediaStudies
I just booked a trip to #Cambridge (UK) for March next year to visit the archives of the "The Center for Computing History" - hoping to find some interesting stuff about the britisch #BASIC development and programmer communities of the 1970s and 1980s.
With the help of a friend and his #Applesauce #Floppy extraction tool I was able to reconstruct 4 more damaged version of the #C64 #BASIC #game "Schanze" I am going to examine for its step-by-step creation. I am able now to compare 13 version (incl. 2 fragments from damaged files)!
On November 7 and 8, the "Working Group on Computer and Computing History" of the Society for Computer Science is organizing the conference "Computers in Germany: Recent Research in Digital History and #ComputerArchaeology." The conference is organized by Martin Schmitt (from @unipotsdam) and myself. The venue is the Heinz #Nixdorf Museums Forum in Paderborn.
The event is public and admission is free. We look forward to many visitors!
#Microsoft just released their #MOS6502 #BASIC source code as #opensource
https://opensource.microsoft.com/blog/2025/09/03/microsoft-open-source-historic-6502-basic/
The Fritz Thyssen Foundation has fully granted our application for a publication cost subsidy for the volume 'What was Artificial Intelligence? contours of a research field 1975-2000 in Germany', which is based on the conference that took place at HU Berlin in 2022.
The book is edited by Martin Schmitt (Uni Paderborn) and me and will be published in the #ComputerArchaeology series this year.
Last week I learned Wolfgang Nake had died on July 17th. Wolfgang has dedicated is retirement time to reenact the early #Atari TTL games - especially #Pong. We cooperated in talks, exhibitions, and in papers many times. I am very sad he died only 70 years old! One of my forthcoming essay collections on #ComputerArchaeology will be dedicated to him and his work.
In my weblog I wrote a short obituray on him:
http://www.simulationsraum.de/blog/2025/08/01/wolfgang-nake-1954-2025/
Another English translated chapter from my earlier work is uploaded to ResearchGate:
Little Data – Fractal Image Compression: From a Network-Historical Miscellany to a Media-Structural Rupture
#Fractals #ComputerArchaeology #ComputerGraphics #Compression
Adrian
µP
root42