Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
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Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
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Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#2Agree with the author’s thesis of how the folks that “grew with computers” have an advantage over those approaching them now, in terms of understanding the inner workings. I’m not sure that this matters much in terms of solving actual problems though, which is probably a good thing.
But I somehow find it a little bit sad that this is the case, so I’ll plug my own https://www.endbasic.dev/ because it’s very fitting in this context :) I’ve been building it precisely as a way to understand everything that’s going on by offering that 1980s experience (although it’s still far from fulfilling the full promise).
Also, buried in the article is a reference to the https://10print.org/ book. I recently came across it at HPB and it has been a pretty entertaining read. Couldn’t believe there was so much to write about such a simple little program!
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#3[deleted]
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#4I learned to program with basic around 1990, using books from the late 70s. What taught me the most were books of computer games… I learned so much because I had to make slight modifications for them to work on the version of QBasic I had, and trying to figure out what to do to make them work was the best teacher I had.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#5This is a lovely ode to the period in which I developed my love for computers. Although like many growing up east of the Atlantic Ocean, my computer of choice was the Sinclair ZX Spectrum. Without the budget to afford to buy much in the way of cassette-based professional software, like most I resorted to manually entering programs from magazines like Sinclair User[1] and Personal Computer World[2], which got me into the habit of reading others' code. When they were inevitably incorrectly entered, I was introduced to debugging techniques for the first time. After a while, I figured that I could write a computer program of my own; and not long after that, I realized I could submit my own program to a magazine and even earn money from it[3]! I don't think I would be working at Google now if it were not for this first-hand, somewhat unforgiving education I got in the 1980s.
That said, those who missed out on this era also missed out on quite how limited the available sources of information were. Without online services to consult, the primary source of information being trial and error, and one incorrect machine code instruction leading to loss of all data entered, progress was very slow going. A committed learner could certainly make far faster progress with a more modern environment.
For today's generation, I'm grateful for books like Charles Petzold's Code [4], which constructs a computer architecture from first principles. The joy is still there waiting to be found!
[1]: https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-033/page/...
[2]: https://archive.org/details/PersonalComputerWorld1984-01/pag...
[3]: https://archive.org/details/sinclair-user-magazine-044/page/...
[4]: https://www.microsoftpressstore.com/store/code-the-hidden-la...
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#6Agree with the author’s thesis of how the folks that “grew with computers” have an advantage over those approaching them now, in terms of understanding the inner workings. I’m not sure that this matters much in terms of solving actual problems though, which is probably a good thing. But I somehow find it a little bit sad that this is the case, so I’ll plug my own https://www.endbasic.dev/ because it’s very fitting in…
let's not overly romanticise it though
the vast majority of people with access to computers in the 80s didn't harness the opportunity to be able to understand a lot of what was happening
that was always going to be the case, and similarly people nowadays more often than not don't harness the vast opportunities that they have at their fingertips
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#7I understand the point the author is trying to make: computers were simpler in 1983 than today, so you could actually understand how they worked, if you studied the technical specs. There was not some big operating system in the way. Operating systems were literally referred to as "disk operating systems," because that's pretty much what they did: mediate loading and saving data to disks.
And that's all a good story, except that it mostly didn't happen.
Not everybody was typing in BASIC listings, then spending hours debugging where the typo was. There was more than enough premade software, including games, out there for the major computers on the market (C64, Apple II, TI-99) that you could have a lot of fun without ever seeing a BASIC prompt.
And, while the manuals were much lower level then than they would be just a few short years later, and you could certainly learn a lot about how to control the machine by PEEKing and POKEing memory locations, the fact that if you POKE some address and the screen changes color doesn't tell you anything about how it all happened. It's just as mysterious as how moving the mouse on a modern computer moves a pointer on the screen.
BASIC is too high level to teach you anything meaningful about what's going on under the hood. But, fortunately, the machine languages of the home computers of this era were generally pretty well documented. However, even then, while you'd know there's this thing called a CPU and that it has things called registers and that you can give it instructions to read and write memory locations, those things are still pretty big abstractions if you want to claim to understand "how it all works."
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#8Agree with the author’s thesis of how the folks that “grew with computers” have an advantage over those approaching them now, in terms of understanding the inner workings. I’m not sure that this matters much in terms of solving actual problems though, which is probably a good thing. But I somehow find it a little bit sad that this is the case, so I’ll plug my own https://www.endbasic.dev/ because it’s very fitting in…
let's not overly romanticise it though the vast majority of people with access to computers in the 80s didn't harness the opportunity to be able to understand a lot of what was happening that was always going to be the case, and similarly people nowadays more often than not don't harness the vast opportunities that they have at their fingertips
Most definitely did not, but for those that put some interest, it seems like it was much easier than these days.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#9Agree with the author’s thesis of how the folks that “grew with computers” have an advantage over those approaching them now, in terms of understanding the inner workings. I’m not sure that this matters much in terms of solving actual problems though, which is probably a good thing. But I somehow find it a little bit sad that this is the case, so I’ll plug my own https://www.endbasic.dev/ because it’s very fitting in…
let's not overly romanticise it though the vast majority of people with access to computers in the 80s didn't harness the opportunity to be able to understand a lot of what was happening that was always going to be the case, and similarly people nowadays more often than not don't harness the vast opportunities that they have at their fingertips
Agreed. I'd guess that for every hobbyist programmer, there were probably at least 10 people who just wanted to play Ultima or something.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#10To be fair, those memory mapped locations of the C-64 were APIs… for accessing the graphics, sound, and i/o capabilities of the system. It was a pretty nice design. One abstraction made the entire system programmable in a flexible, intuitive way and played well with the CPU’s native machine language. You just needed a good memory map. (A knack for memorizing useful memory locations didn’t hurt either)