So ubiquitous, it was even on the Playstation 2. :^)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yabasic#PlayStation_2
https://www.theregister.com/2000/11/07/sony_adds_basic_to_pl...
BASIC turns 60
81–90 of 144 posts
Re: BASIC turns 60
#82It's hard to overstate how important BASIC was to the adoption of personal computing - it provided a straightforward way to program an entire generation of home computers and bootstrapped countless careers.
Yep, BASIC bootstrapped my programming interest even as late as the late 2000s. School library was ancient, the only programming books were on BASIC and internet access was limited. So I got started trying to use those to learn this: https://justbasic.com/ (surprisingly, updated even up till 2018, and the paid version updated just a few months ago). As a clueless, overly ambitious 12 year old I was a massive annoyanc…
AFAIK, my highschool still is offering BASIC in their intro CS curriculum. It's just so accessible and many of us preferred it over Python for intro classes
Re: BASIC turns 60
#83Let's see my BE language progression went from... Apple Logo->Commodore BASIC->Fortran->Pascal->PHP->Java->VB6->.NET...and other modern things. ...With scripts of various types mixed in there. But BASIC is what got me hooked. Being able to write my own games on the Commodore 128 was fantastically addicting. Leaving demo store Commodore's flashing background colors with POKE 53281 and looping around felt like I was th…
What was really great with BASIC on computers like the C64 or C128 was that the barrier of entry was so low. It was just there, it was the shell. So you might as well try that
10 PRINT“HELLO“
20 GOTO 10
and see what happens
Re: BASIC turns 60
#84Having QBASIC right there and available to play with was my introduction to programming as a curious 11 year old. I remember reading every topic in the help browser over and over looking for how to write to the screen, because I didn't want my first program to waste paper with the PRINT statement. One section of the manual told me to use labels instead of old fashioned line numbers, but I could never figure out the s…
>It was always a big mystery why renaming my program from .BAS to .EXE didn't let me click to run it like other programs.
Ha. Like other such newbie-isms.
One of my favorites:
Computer: Hit any key to continue.
User: Where's the any key?
A google search will turn many more amusing ones.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#85I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?
We had a version of Bomberman that was written in some version of BASIC in high school (maybe QBasic?). It was great because we could hack on it to modify the game and immediately play with those modifications.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#86It's hard to overstate how important BASIC was to the adoption of personal computing - it provided a straightforward way to program an entire generation of home computers and bootstrapped countless careers.
I don’t understand why it isn’t taught to kids instead of scratch. Visual coding is my nemesis. I just disagree with it in principle. It makes even the simplest things complicated and virtually impossible to debug. BASIC was the first computer language I learned. It’s so basic I just taught it to myself from the help section when I was 12, without any exceptional ability on my part.
You're giving me ideas-- My oldest is nine and that's probably around the age when I first got my own computer (a 286) and dove into QBasic. There's no way he'd choose to spend time in BASIC unless it was his only option. I have an ancient Thinkpad gathering dust, maybe I'll install DOS 6.22 on that sucker and have it boot straight into QBasic from autoexec.bat.
At bedtime we're a "you don't have to sleep, but you have to be quiet" household so if he had it in his room it might see some use.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#87I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?
At my first job, our order entry system was written in BASIC. The second version of the system was written in QBasic. I wrote lots of test and demo code in the language. We used it in all our manuals, since it was the one language that we knew our customers (mostly engineers and scientists) would be able to program in.
I started writing a spreadsheet in BASIC, but never finished. I wrote a couple of simple games in it also.
There are more, but I've forgotten about them.
Now, if we expand the definition to include VisualBASIC, then the amount of production software written in the language explodes into at least 100,000 programs.
Re: BASIC turns 60
#88I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?
It depends on what you mean by "BASIC". Nobody in that world cared much about portability or standardization, so the language had a protean quality; every vendor offered their own flavor, tailored to the needs of its platform. The variant you used may well have been a mere teaching tool, but there certainly were other dialects which served as serious application development platforms. I was a big fan of BASIC when I…
Right. Still remember the day in college when I booted up my Radio Shack Micro Color Computer (MC-10) and someone exclaimed excitedly, "it has Microsoft BASIC."
Re: BASIC turns 60
#89I distinctly remember being taught BASIC in school in the 1980s and quickly thinking “this is awfully basic” and not wanting much to do with it. Now I don’t know if my childhood evaluation was correct but I do wonder: Were there many complex programs written in BASIC? Or was it largely a teaching tool?
VBA was used for tons of enterprise applications in the late '90s and early oughts. The implementation in things like Excel was surprisingly powerful and they had to sort of dial it back because they realized it was a huge security risk. (You could open up a spreadsheet that was a powerful virus.) In the '90s when we were developing a 3D game (in C++) I made an early iteration of the level designer in VBA on Excel. Y…
Ugh!
I still have nightmares about having to write the Validation procedure documents for a medical device production Quality system written in VBA/Excel. The program had started out as some scientist's desktop tool and somehow over the years, morphed into an actual production tool that now needed to be formally validated since we needed to make a change to it. Worst combination of spaghetti code and Big Ball of Mud that I've ever seen. I had the misfortune of being the only SW dev who was senior enough to do the task and who wasn't busy at the time, so I drew short straw!
I shudder to think of the millions of dollars of product that have been shipped as a result of that code!
Re: BASIC turns 60
#90I read a book called A People's History of Computing in the United States, which wildly oversells itself, it's just a history of Dartmouth Basic and the culture surrounding it.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674970977
But even then it was very interesting! The philosophy was that anyone could program, and they really did build a culture of amateurs writing programs that answered their own needs. The author has access to a lot of ephemera from that time which gives some flavor of what it was like in the lab.
And then, BASIC culture spread by unlikely methods, like the Pillsbury Dough company. No, really. For whatever reason they got involved allowing local schools in the midwest to time-share with their big mainframes.