<story><title>How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch</title><url>http://gizmodo.com/how-steve-wozniak-wrote-basic-for-the-original-apple-fr-1570573636/all</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>k1w1</author><text>The update that describes why 4KB of RAM was necessary was interesting to me. In 1998 I wrote a Java Virtual Machine in assembly language for a PIC-like microcontroller that only had 4k of ROM (actually it was 4k instructions, but they were 12-bit words giving 6kB). I managed to get all of the important features of the language to fit, including exception handling and an interactive debugger. However by the end, each time I wanted to add a new instruction to my code I had to find something else to optimize first so it would still fit in 4k.&lt;p&gt;By the end I convinced myself that 4k was the minimum possible code size for implementing a JVM.&lt;p&gt;The JVM was used in the Parallax Javelin Stamp - a Java version of the BASIC Stamp (&lt;a href=&quot;http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASIC_Stamp&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;BASIC_Stamp&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;p&gt;As an aside, the SX microcontroller only had 256 bytes (yes bytes!) of RAM internally so I used an external 32kB SRAM for the Java heap and stack. The 256 bytes of internal RAM held the internal state of the interpreter and memory manager.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Steve Wozniak Wrote BASIC for the Original Apple From Scratch</title><url>http://gizmodo.com/how-steve-wozniak-wrote-basic-for-the-original-apple-fr-1570573636/all</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>matthewmcg</author><text>&amp;quot;In 1967 or 1968, as a senior in high school, our electronics teacher ... arranged for me to go to a company in Sunnyvale (Sylvania) to program a computer because I already knew all the electronics in class at school. Mr. McCollum did this for students with electronics abilities every year, finding local companies with engineers and projects that would let high school students come and and get some experience.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s amazing that his high school had electronics classes and vocational externships. Is that something that was common at the time or just another amazing aspect of Silicon Valley?</text></comment>