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The Curious Case of Jupiter Ace

Why was BASIC so important to home computers and could Forth have displaced it?

While the story of this computer and its creators is fascinating, this article focuses on one aspect of it: why was having BASIC embedded in ROM so important back then, and was replacing it with Forth a mistake? This is only partially true: these devices did not rely on disk drives; the system software that controlled them was stored in read-only memory (ROM). The last point was particularly important, and according to Chuck Peddle who designed the first home computer - Commodore PET 2001, it was the main reason he decided to include BASIC in the device’s ROM.

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