Many, perhaps most, of the teachers are underpaid. If spending more money isn't helping, there are probably too many middle-managers sucking up the money. Remove some of the middle-managers and divert their money to the teachers.

I keep hearing this. I have yet to find a teacher or a school district or a government employee or department or organization of any kind that didn't clamour for more more more funds.

We spend twice what we did in 1970's in real terms; results ... the same.

The world would still have them but perhaps not as quickly is the only difference.

Sysops did but BBS users didn't need to do that.

1:255/42 here

Whether that is good or bad depends on their cost of living.

Because it didn't come back for hours.

It's a non-numbered line.

Sword of Fargoal and Pirates! were both almost entirely written in uncompiled BASIC.

There are a lot of uninformed consumers who are buying/using things they might not if they were informed.

I've benchmarked Applesoft and Commodore BASIC quite a bit and they benchmark exactly the same, so I'm not surprised. Both systems run at 1.023 MHz in NTSC. Of course, they are both derived from Microsoft's 6502 BASIC. I'm sure they're not cycle exact but they are close enough that BASIC doesn't show any difference.