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40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

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Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

#11

Post by wlindley »

ale42 wrote: post #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://git…

Heath/Zenith's ZBASIC on the MSDOS-but-not-PCDOS Z-100 used a similar format but with at least different keywords. Somewhere I had a set of programs I had written in ZBASIC but could never load after selling that computer. Wonder if I still have the floppies squirreled away, now that I have a Greaseweazel to read those diskettes...

Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

#12

Post by hedora »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #7
ale42 wrote: post #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://git…

What a weird Git repo structure. One branch for each language, instead of a directory for each language.

I had a colleague that did something similar. It generated a lot of confused “which branch do I check out?” slack messages.

Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

#13

Post by hedora »

dpweb wrote: post #10

3.5" 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 :)

We were still using 5 1/4”, but the school CS teacher had a special press that cut a notch into the 360K (?) ones to trick the Apple II’s into using them in 720K mode.

She also had a utility to copy original software disks onto the “high density” disks, then read back the data.

From what I could tell, it worked like a charm. 10% of the copies failed, but whatever.

(Coursework was stored on unmodified disks, of course.)

Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

#14

Post by [deleted] »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #7
ale42 wrote: post #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://git…

What a weird Git repo structure. One branch for each language, instead of a directory for each language.

[deleted]

Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

#16

Post by lloydatkinson »

hedora wrote: post #12
lloydatkinson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a weird Git repo structure. One branch for each language, instead of a directory for each language.

I had a colleague that did something similar. It generated a lot of confused “which branch do I check out?” slack messages.

It seems totally at odds with common sense. Now, every time you need to make some change across multiple branches you have to go through a lot of unnecessary pain.

Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

#17

Post by abdulhaq »

lloydatkinson wrote: post #7
ale42 wrote: post #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://git…

What a weird Git repo structure. One branch for each language, instead of a directory for each language.

Probably an ex-subversion user

Re: 40-Year old BASICA utility code for teaching

#18

Post by unregistereddev »

hedora wrote: post #13
dpweb wrote: post #10

3.5" 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 :)

We were still using 5 1/4”, but the school CS teacher had a special press that cut a notch into the 360K (?) ones to trick the Apple II’s into using them in 720K mode. She also had a utility to copy original software disks onto the “high density” disks, then read back the data. From what I could tell, it worked like a charm. 10% of the copies failed, but whatever. (Coursework was stored on unmodified disks, of course…

The special press was fancy! I used a hole punch (the type intended for punching small round holes in paper), and as long as you lined it up correctly it worked great.
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