40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
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Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#2These scripts were written by my father in the 1980s, he was a middle school science teacher and wrote these to help him manage classrooms. I think it’s a cool example of the way personal computing changed life in that era; he was never a software engineer, just a guy that needed to automate some tedious work. I encoded the BAS files in utf8 so they are easier to read.
Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#3How neat! Thanks for sharing. Wish we could get back to everyday people being creators as well as consumers
Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#4This is fascinating, thank you for preserving this work!
Do you have more details on the machine used by your father to develop these utilities? what process did you follow to extract these from the 3.5mm floppy disk?
Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#5How neat! Thanks for sharing. Wish we could get back to everyday people being creators as well as consumers
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Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#6> Because DOS systems used CP437 encoding it is unlikely any of your editors will even be able to open the .BAS programming files in the Program directory
Actually this is not related to CP437. For normal ASCII text, CP437 and UTF-8 are identical... the problem is that BASICA/GW-BASIC were storing the source code in tokenized binary form, probably to save disk space. See for example this decoding utility: https://github.com/rwtodd/bascat
Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#7> Because DOS systems used CP437 encoding it is unlikely any of your editors will even be able to open the .BAS programming files in the Program directory Actually this is not related to CP437. For normal ASCII text, CP437 and UTF-8 are identical... the problem is that BASICA/GW-BASIC were storing the source code in tokenized binary form, probably to save disk space. See for example this decoding utility: https://git…
What a weird Git repo structure. One branch for each language, instead of a directory for each language.
Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#8> Because DOS systems used CP437 encoding it is unlikely any of your editors will even be able to open the .BAS programming files in the Program directory Actually this is not related to CP437. For normal ASCII text, CP437 and UTF-8 are identical... the problem is that BASICA/GW-BASIC were storing the source code in tokenized binary form, probably to save disk space. See for example this decoding utility: https://git…
Wasn't there a way to tell BASIC to save in ASCII, rather than tokenized? Something like sticking ",A" onto the end of the save command? Or maybe I'm thinking of gwbasic ..
Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#9> Because DOS systems used CP437 encoding it is unlikely any of your editors will even be able to open the .BAS programming files in the Program directory Actually this is not related to CP437. For normal ASCII text, CP437 and UTF-8 are identical... the problem is that BASICA/GW-BASIC were storing the source code in tokenized binary form, probably to save disk space. See for example this decoding utility: https://git…
Wasn't there a way to tell BASIC to save in ASCII, rather than tokenized? Something like sticking ",A" onto the end of the save command? Or maybe I'm thinking of gwbasic ..
Not sure about BASICA, but GWBASIC definitely had this ",A" at the end of the filename to save in text format. It even had a ",P" flag to save in "protected" tokenized format (which you can't "officially" list, although a POKE at the good undocumented place could remove the flag: https://www-user.tu-chemnitz.de/~heha/hsn/chm/gwbasic.chm/to...).
Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching
#103.5" disks, nice. We were still on 5 1/4" in high school in 87-88.. True floppys! I remember thinking 3.5" hard disk - wow the technology :)