FTFM
What Dominic failed to do was "find the fine manual". DEC produced excellent manuals for all its software products, and the manuals were usually bundled into the price. To put it more clearly, they were rarely sold separately; DEC took the view that if you bought some software you would need the manuals, so it produced them with just as much care as the software itself. I used to know some DEC technical writers, and some of them got to know more about their specialist software products than the engineers who maintained them. The VMS manual set was so extensive it came to be known as "the orange wall".
The manuals for your BASIC were probably locked away somewhere safe "so the kids won't mess them up".
Biting the hand that feeds IT
