Yes, initially my only goal was to try and make a “useful” language in as small an implementation as possible. I’ve always been obsessed with small/simple/fast (still am), and for me this was a fun diversion from the relative complexity of the E compiler.

I knew the language had to be based on Forth, as there’s no other language that has such simple parsing (it is mostly just a sequence of operations, little structure) and execution model (each operation simply takes from / adds to the stack).

Mostly by announcing it on usenet. That had a tight-knit community of Amiga programmers that was easy to reach. Then on Fish disks and Aminet as well. At some point, print magazines started to cover it with courses etc, and I got invited to speak at conferences about it.

It got fairly popular, to the point where at some point a popularity poll was held somewhere on the internets, and E came in second after C/C , but before Pascal and Basic. Probably a biased sample, but still :)

Base for a lot of computers (GUI, Mac, Atari, Amiga, Next  etc) arcades and Arcades! Expensive but with a fantastic assembler-language. 

very important also for the developers of games. it was knowhow. the ground language. 

interesting game in the development line of the text adventures of the 80ies and their language pattern. new possible with modern ai. 

communities (as systems) have their own language, their own values (and thus also their own capitals), their own operations, their own exensions, their own decision extensions.

Basic was one of the first coding possibilities in the 8bit and also the ‘OS’. the interface to the computer. The shells were ‘basic’.

LOAD “”",8,1

With the second generation of homecomputers. The linenumberless basic came up like GFA-Basic etc. This was a new step and brought basic on the level of Pascal and co. 

of course mainframe computing was only possible for universities, students or big companies. creating workstation like lilith or next were a middle thing between mainframe and personal computers. 

cently founded by Eduard Stiefel, where he worked together with Ambros Speiser on developing the first Swiss computer ERMETH, and developed the programming language Superplan (1949–1951), the name being a reference to Rechenplan (English: computation plan), in Konrad Zuse's terminology, designating a single Plankalkül program. He contributed especially in the field of compiler pioneering work and was eventually involved in defining the languages ALGOL 58 and ALGOL 60. He was a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[1] which specified, maintains, and supports ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.[2]

Demo coder, known for cool demos and trainers.
Depeche jonied Spreadponit in 1989. He mysteriously left SP in 1990 and broke up alomst all contact. He then went over to DefJam but not very much later stopped his Amiga activity. Depeche was so fond of language games that he once bought a Langenscheid's dictionary of slang-English!

Data 
Born 1972, grown up and living in Switzerland
Todays occupation: finishing studies (comp. sci)

Work
Demos: Wooow, Scrapheap, Empire, Power!, HI5 and more
Trainers: a whole lot...
Sound: some crazy mixes
Tools: a disk copier in a bootblock, TLB-Utilitydisk, more

Hobbies
old days: being creative, being cool, speaking cool, cool places, cool clothes, cool people, arcade games, pinball machines
today: unknown.

Music
DM, Art of Noise, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys, Yello, LL cool J, Derek B, De la soul, ...

To keep it simple to parse, I knew that each operation had to be a single character. Then it dawned on me just how unreadable this language would become, and it was at that point that I thought it would be fun to use more obscure symbols to make it crazy looking on purpose. The idea that you could have a collection of random-looking symbols, and that it would actually be useful, and implemented using such a small compiler got me excited :)

Back then yes. Me and Chris Pressey would email a lot, with him showing me his latest creations (I mostly went back to “serious” language design after FALSE :). There was also quite a bit of community around FALSE, with people making implementations in other languages/systems, or make dialects etc. There was actually quite a few people that made “useful” programs in FALSE

The after mainframe-area (based on c and co) was driven by coding near the hardware to get more speed. espacially in games. So Assembler was important. 

this computers came with an operating system, gui-based and mouse. basic was a prg to use (not anymore line based). there were some new styles of basics coming up like gfa-basic, omikron-basic (atari st). 

and the most games were coded in assembler (68000 was a god processor for assembler). so you had to buy assembler, which was not included. 

There are different types of hacker:

>> homecomputers .. 

{ comment }

64o: { stor 64 to o}
[15][o;1 o:o;,]# { while 15 do  read o add 1 and store o read o print  end  }

 

// store 10o:

// load o;

// print ,

// while [ COND ][ ARGUMENTS  ] #

 

Very emblematic use of technical possibilities