> I thought you were another Acorn veteran? IIRC the BBC Micro series, as 
> well as the Archimedes, all shipped with full manuals, including a BASIC 
> programming guide and a full list of BASIC-accessible OS calls.

They all had the BASIC manual, but IIRC not the accessible OS calls (all OS 
calls were accessible from BASIC, weren't they, isn't that what SYS did?). 
The manual did not tell you how to swap screen buffers, create Windows, read 
from template files, create icons etc - all pretty important for more than 
text based programs.

Later on, !StrongHelp came along, which was a vast reference of all OS 
calls.

> I think you had to buy the assembly-language stuff

I picked up a 2nd hand copy of an assembly programming book at some computer 
show, it was more of a reference manual, but I still taught myself assembler 
from it.

> and the complete OS reference manual separately, though.

Unfortunately yes, and they were very pricey, like 100 pounds I think.  Way 
too much for someone at school to spend.  Maybe if I had bought them I would 
have got on my feet much quicker with programming.

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