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The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

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Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#231

Post by tomc1985 »

cachestash wrote: post #127

My first foray into BASIC was BBC BASIC. I was an 11 year old in the eighties and attending comprehensive secondary school in the UK. We had a school 'computer room' which hosted ten BBC Micros. The mathematics teacher at the time ran an after school computer club and it was alleged that the last 30 minutes were unstructured and some students had managed to get a cassette tape copy of Elite (now Elite Dangerous) load…

Is it really a good idea to be just as enthusiastic about tech now as you were then? Few things are what they say they are any more. Everyone's clawing at your personal data. With a few large exceptions, all the innovation goes to things make both us and tech cost less to management, or manipulate our attention, or track us because business types think theres gold in them thar hills. Half-assed attempts at things like "agile" abound so that we can please nosy managers. "Code as art" falls by the wayside as many of us are reduced to stringing together various services for a living

Tech isn't fun anymore...

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#232

Post by guenthert »

I don't care about Microsoft's BASIC, in fact I don't care much about BASIC at all. It was a poor choice 35 years ago, it's irrelevant today. Or nearly so.

However, I do find GPIB programming examples in what seems to be Rocky Mountain BASIC (HP BASIC / HT BASIC) in the manuals of measurement devices from the seventies to the early nineties. Analog electronics didn't evolve nearly as quickly over the last forty years as digital, so some of those instruments are still significant today (chiefly to hobbyists, but at least the HP 3458A, introduced 1989, is still produced virtually unchanged and is even today the top-end long scale-scale DMM).

I like to see a OSS implementation of that dialect (for Linux).

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#233

Post by guenthert »

peteri wrote: post #188
mrweasel wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but opening a random file yields the comment: .RADIX 8 ; To be safe To be safe of what exactly?

Probably because the PDP & Intel 8080 were typically octal systems rather than hex, the 8080 instruction set decoded nicely in octal (or at least the MOV A,H instructions). By the time the 8086 arrived the micro-computer world had moved to hex as it nice decode mapping was broken by the Z80 and the 6502/68xx families didn't have that nice split. So my guess this is to allow 12 octal to be 10 decimal as that would hav…

I thought the whole octal business stemmed from the time mainframes and minis used 36b, 18b words respectively as 6bit (early mainframe character width) can be conveniently represented as two digit octal. This changed when computers went 16/32bit and started to use 8bit bytes (and ASCII encoding of characters).

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#234

Post by ddingus »

cachestash wrote: post #127

My first foray into BASIC was BBC BASIC. I was an 11 year old in the eighties and attending comprehensive secondary school in the UK. We had a school 'computer room' which hosted ten BBC Micros. The mathematics teacher at the time ran an after school computer club and it was alleged that the last 30 minutes were unstructured and some students had managed to get a cassette tape copy of Elite (now Elite Dangerous) load…

I can relate! My first BASIC programs were on paper too. For similar reasons.

In my case, it resulted in a trip to a neighbors house where I could input and run some programs. Mine didn't work, but it did not take too long to fix that.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#235

Post by ddingus »

tomc1985 wrote: post #231
cachestash wrote: post #127

My first foray into BASIC was BBC BASIC. I was an 11 year old in the eighties and attending comprehensive secondary school in the UK. We had a school 'computer room' which hosted ten BBC Micros. The mathematics teacher at the time ran an after school computer club and it was alleged that the last 30 minutes were unstructured and some students had managed to get a cassette tape copy of Elite (now Elite Dangerous) load…

Is it really a good idea to be just as enthusiastic about tech now as you were then? Few things are what they say they are any more. Everyone's clawing at your personal data. With a few large exceptions, all the innovation goes to things make both us and tech cost less to management, or manipulate our attention, or track us because business types think theres gold in them thar hills. Half-assed attempts at things lik…

Sure it is!

Go small. Embedded / retro / various micro controllers are a ton of fun, and they have most of the feel we all experienced back then too. A decade ago, I had a bunker. Unix, Linux, Windows, BSD, OS X, all piled into a basement running pretty much everything. It was serious fun building it up, and then when I got there?

These dark times took a lot of the fun out of it. So, I literally gave the best away to a younger guy I could see drooling over the whole works and ordered some micros. Back to my roots.

Assembly language was fun in the 80's. It's fun now. Hooking shit up to do things? Yup. Even more fun now because there is so damn much just laying around, and we can get almost anything delivered for a song too.

Back in the day, I actually got good at vacuum tubes. That is what was laying around, and I was in poverty at the time. (Which actually was good for me personally, no worries, no regrets, no harm done)

My point being:

Seeing and channeling that excitement will pay off for most who experience it.

Yeah, big brother networked computing is in a dark time. Oh well. It's a big world of tech out there.

And, these days?

Hell, we are super good at electro mechanical. So, a young person can get a look at that, learn to program, control things.

Then, head over to bio tech, which will soon be electro-bio-mechanical, among other things, and likely experience a boom and sense of wonder at it all same as we did.

I pretty much am against snuffing out those little sparks. Sometimes there is only one. Sometimes they don't come back.

I would have hated to see my own snuffed out. At that time, I probably would not realize the impact. But today I would, and do not want anyone with inclination to self-learn, grow, do, build, experiment, teach, go into business, to lose any of that inclination just because we see some bad times right now.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#236

Post by ddingus »

C1sc0cat wrote: post #223
Starwatcher2001 wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a bug in the TRS-80 basic (which was indeed Microsoft). It had an "on x goto" command that allowed the program to move to different lines depending on the value of a variable: ON X GOTO 200,300,400,500 depending if x=1, x=2,x=3... They'd obviously used the same parser for the standard "If a=1 then goto 200" construct, which allowed an undocumented shortcut of "If a=1, 200" which a few people noticed and sta…

ooh I never worked on TRS80's - so they had a version of the Arithmetic IF :-) I could have Told BillG that was bad idea back when I was 19

  x = x + (x
:D

No If needed.

Atari Basic would allow crazy things like:

  10 Goto ((x
Goes to either line 50 or 150, depending on the comparison result being 1, or 0)

Or...

  Goto (100*x)
Faster On goto with no checking, lol.

Bill Gates was not involved with the original Atari Basic. That could be purchased on a cartridge for running MS Basic programs.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#237

Post by panzagl »

guenthert wrote: post #230
vidarh wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More than luxuriant. Commodore BASIC (effectively 6502 Microsoft BASIC under license with tweaks) on the C64 only looked at the first two characters of variable names. It allowed them to be longer (don't remember how long), but would ignore subsequent letters.

This is getting off-track, but while the pitfalls of two relevant characters out of potentially many are obvious and only excusable due to technical limitation of the platform, insisting on more than 40 relevant characters is likewise contraproductive. Who (which human ) will readily distinguish two character strings more than 40 characters in length sharing the first 40? I feel often the need to remind programmers,…

Does namespacing count? com.mycompany.class.classfactory.factory.initializer.StaticGlobal

Sure you can usually use import/aliasing to narrow it, but sometimes you just need to grab some random global from somewhere.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#238

Post by salamanderman »

linguae wrote: post #56

The funny thing about this announcement is that a week ago I just found my old QBASIC textbook that I learned how to program with back in 1998. QBASIC was my very first programming language; I was a nine year old kid who loved computers and would read anything computer-related that was available, including my mom's textbooks (she was returning to college at the time and took some courses on computing and applications…

I asked my dad, who programmed in C for work, to teach me how to program, but he was a bit too tired after work, and compilers weren't free back then. Instead he pointed me to QBasic, thinking I'd goof around with it for a little while and probably move on to the next thing. One day I pulled him in to show him a wireframe 3d graphics program I'd written, you could rotate simple models around, and he went "oh no, I'm so sorry, you've learned too much QBasic. I'll teach you C". I remember using GWBasic as well, but I don't think I made anything more than little Choose Your Own Adventure-type stories, i.e. a few if statements.

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#239

Post by OOPMan »

linguae wrote: post #56

The funny thing about this announcement is that a week ago I just found my old QBASIC textbook that I learned how to program with back in 1998. QBASIC was my very first programming language; I was a nine year old kid who loved computers and would read anything computer-related that was available, including my mom's textbooks (she was returning to college at the time and took some courses on computing and applications…

I started with QBASIC too.

Except I'd learned Speccy Basic from an Usborne book (Prior to getting access to a real computer) and as a result some parts of my programs failed to work correctly (usually stuff around PEEK and POKE)

It was a while before I worked out that the issue was :-)

Re: The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983

#240

Post by WorldMaker »

downerending wrote: post #93

Not sure whether it was exactly this version, but on an early job in the mid 80s, used a Microsoft BASIC compiler on a PC in a shared office. At least by default, when compiling, it would ring the "bell" on every syntax error. And by "ring", I mean loudly . BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP. Which I discovered sitting at the PC, surrounded by secretaries, who commenced withering stares. That's the first day I rememb…

Supposedly IBM's fault that the original PC speaker failed to think of niceties like a mute button.

As late as the 486 era I remember how often it was reminded to people to just disconnect the PC Speaker. I also recall there were also crazy case mods where people would add a switch to their cases to add an on/off button.

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