retrocomputnig

2 Articles

BASICODE: A Bit Like Java, But From The 1980s

October 14, 2025 by 29 Comments

Those of us ancient enough to remember the time, or even having grown up during the heyday of the 8-bit home computer, may recall the pain of trying to make your latest creation work on another brand of computer. They all spoke some variant of BASIC, yet were wildly incompatible with each other regardless. BASICODE was a neat solution to this, acting as an early compatibility standard and abstraction layer. It was essentially a standardized BASIC subset with a few extra routines specialized per platform.

But that’s only part of the story. The BASICODE standard program was invented by Dutch radio engineer Hessel de Vries, who worked for the Dutch national radio broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS). It was designed to be broadcast over FM radio! The idea of standardization and free national deployment was brilliant and lasted until 1992, when corporate changes and technological advancements ultimately led to its decline.

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OSI Superboard II Replicated

April 24, 2023 by 6 Comments

While our modern computer can easily emulate a lot of different old machines, there is something about having replica hardware that is even better. Not as nice as having the real thing, in some ways, although you don’t have to worry about wear and tear on a replica, either. [Jeff Tranter] has built a kit replica of an Ohio Scientific Superboard II, and it looks great, as you can see in the video below.

This was an inexpensive all-in-one 6502 computer with a keyboard and provision for TV or monitor output. If you had a 5V power supply, a cassette deck, and a TV you were in business for less money than most of the comparable alternatives. In fact, [Jeff] has the canceled check where his parents paid $486 Canadian for one in 1981. That was his introduction to computing, and we’d say that was a reasonable investment on the part of his parents.

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