I knew enough about the Commodore 64 Basic that I could leave the mall Radio Shack with it flashing wild colors or streaming a sentence. (Which was a highlight of going to the mall.) I started actually coding when we got a PC clone around 1984. First the Basic that came with it, and occasional forays into Assembly, which always felt like black magic. But soon enough Turbo Pascal was the real deal. And then I got hooked up with Turbo C, and boy was I hooked. I probably learned the most about the internals with C, because of pointers within a context I could actually easily reason about.
Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
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Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#12Discussed at the time (of the article):
Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17900494 - Sept 2018 (160 comments)
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#13Going back to your experience with programming, it's inspiring to hear how you progressed from BASIC to Assembly, Turbo Pascal, and eventually Turbo C. It's great that you found C to be a language that allowed you to reason about pointers and understand the internals of how programs work.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I was literally the person that just wanted to play Ultima (Underworld). But when things didn't work because the sound card didn't have the right jumper settings, or there wasn't enough free ram, or I just didn't understand how to start the game up in the most optimized way, I had to figure that stuff out, without the internet. Ultima jump started my IT career.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#15the first kids that grew up with computers in the uk (about 1979) learned that running into a wh smith or similar store, where primitive computers (spectrum, vic) were on sale and ran demoing, and then doing reprehensible stuff like this:
10 print "fuck you"
20 goto 10
and then running out.
some may be running major companies now.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#16I 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,…
FWIW, I literally used to type in programs from magazines (starting in 1984), and spent many hours poring over a bootleg commented disassembly of Microsoft's BASIC implementation for the RadioShack/Tandy Color Computer II.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#17I 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.
It was amazing what you could accomplish in QBasic. As a child the possibilities were nearly endless and with the built in help it was so approachable.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#18Shout out to Rodney Zaks and his Z80 assembly programming book. Books were so important back then to learn things, especially if you were somewhat isolated.
Those of us who owned offbeat PCs in the early 1980s probably were more motivated to learn our machines as the games and whatnot were much more limited. Wish I had never given away my Microbee...
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#19Agree 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…
We still have that 80s experience. Lest you forget, the TI83/84 is the only Collegeboard approved graphing calculator for the SAT and is thus the public school standard through to today. Well into the 2000s and probably still now bored teens have TI BASIC with them.
Re: Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 (2018)
#20It is still possible to get a 8088 (or similar) developer board and code like it is 1983. What's missing is how we get from the "raw" experience to the "everything is abstraction/virtualisation" world we have now.