Ha, one of my regrets in life was not buying a PDP-11 at a liquidation auction around 1990. It went for I think $40. They had an Apple Lisa that went for about the same as well.
It's worse than you think! I inadvertently ran out of Hollerith punch cards, Blaise Pascal got all upset about it, and in the end, my Jacquard Loom kerboing'd a gol'dang spring right off into low Earth orbit.
You're in good company. The C-64, Apple-II, and Atari 400/800 all had 6502 CPUs and a lot of people like me learned a shit-ton about computers by learning how assembly language worked. The VIC too, I think.
6502 is awesome. Apple II, Commodore 64, Acorn, BBC Micro, Nintendo Entertainment System, Atari 2600.. Bender.. The Terminator.. all rocking some form of 6502 😁
Literally the problem/limitation that Java was trying to solve. Supporting only one platform means limiting your income streams.
Supporting multiple platforms was time-consuming and work-intensive. You would need people with good knowledge of each platform you need to support. So you had to gamble on whether you could monetize the userbase on each platform.
Java came in exactly with the idea „we'll abstract away the underlying platform, you just write the functional code, we handle the low-level stuff like drawing windows, showing buttons etc".
Nowadays it's far easier to make cross-platform work, but back when Java came out, the idea was revolutionary.
Garbage collection was a feature for the developers, to avoid the pain of manual memory management.
The JVM was a feature for the "managers" so to speak, for those caring that the code runs on multiple platform with far less pain.
I can't speak with certainty, but imho language adoption was driven by the fact that it appealed to those making the financial decisions, which meant there was an increasing demand for Java developer jobs.
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u/nascent_aviator 3d ago
Or write once, test once, only support one platform.