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BASIC at 50

dartmouth.edu

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Re: BASIC at 50

#11

Post by k-mcgrady »

astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

>> "I think there's a whole generation that grew up on BASIC. I wonder what today's generation growing up on?"

About 6 years ago when I was in high school we were using...Pascal! During that time I actually did some work experience with Borland (creators of Turbo Pascal) and they found it hilarious we were still using it.

Re: BASIC at 50

#12

Post by notarockstar »

astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

Scratch.

Re: BASIC at 50

#13

Post by softbuilder »

I'm currently reading "The Dream Machine"[1] and coincidentally at the point where BASIC is being invented. What I found interesting is how closely linked LISP and BASIC are in motivation and the spirit of the era. Not to mention the direct connection of Dartmouth, McCarthy, and time sharing.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution...

Re: BASIC at 50

#14

Post by gshubert17 »

My first programming experience was with BASIC running on a GE time-sharing system in 1971. We worked on teletype machines and used paper tape to store and load programs. I remember that the user manual was fairly small and reasonably helpful. Performance wasn't too bad late at night when the folks who used the GE machine had gone home.

Re: BASIC at 50

#15

Post by protomyth »

astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

> I wonder what today's generation growing up on?

Pretty much every 8-bit came with a BASIC[1]. I would imagine a lot of kids today don't program anything since it is much less accessible.

1) had to buy the cartridge for the Atari 8-bits

Re: BASIC at 50

#16

Post by vivin »

astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

> "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C"

So much of this! I remember the older kids talking about Pascal (they were using TurboPascal at the time) and to me it was some mystical, highly-advanced form of magic, a sort of "more complex" BASIC. However, I never actually learned Pascal or used it, because I jumped directly from BASIC to C (actually ended up doing both for a while). The reason I even found out about C, was because I asked my computer teacher in junior high how people made games, and she told me that it was a language called C. So that summer I got myself an ANSI C book and started teaching myself C.

It was very difficult at first but I slowly got the hang of it. By junior year of high school we were doing C++, and having done C it was really easy for me to switch to C++.

Re: BASIC at 50

#17

Post by protomyth »

I miss Antic and the other magazines that came with programs to type in and modify. I learned about checksumming from those magazines :)

Re: BASIC at 50

#18

Post by munificent »

peterevans wrote: post #7

Thinking back on BASIC, what stands out most to me are the line numbers. At the time, I never understood the point; I mean, sure, you needed them for GOTO and GOSUB. But it just seemed like so much labor. And, of course, why not labels, names for subroutines? Other languages had them. But when you think back on how assembly looked and worked at the time, you realize that the line numbers are sort of analogous to addr…

> Thinking back on BASIC, what stands out most to me are the line numbers.

Because in most computers at the time, you didn't have an editor that could edit an entire source file. I remember writing BASIC on a TRS-80 and an Apple IIe. Those just had line editors.

Line numbers let you identify which line in the program you want to edit. Typing in:

    20 PRINT "HI"
meant, "replace line 20 with that".

You spaced out your numbers (usually multiples of ten) so that you had some available numbers if you need to insert some code between two lines. If that got crowded, typing in "RENUM" would renumber all of your lines and neatly space them out again.

At a child, I remember thinking RENUM was the most magically complex algorithm I could imagine.

Re: BASIC at 50

#19

Post by munificent »

cmang wrote: post #6
astral303 wrote: post #2

When I was little, back in post-Soviet Russia (circa early 1990's), the prevailing progression of a developer was "learn BASIC, learn Pascal, then learn C". And, if you were extra badass, you'd learn assembly. BASIC was the first step, simple and easily accessible on most computers of the day (ZX Spectrum, MSX, Atari, GWBasic/QBasic on MS-DOS). Best of all, being an interpreted language meant that you often had the s…

> I wonder what today's generation growing up on? Immediately HTML+Javascript comes to mind, as a language interpreter that every kid's computer comes with. I would guess that is the top "first language" for kids today, with things like C#, Python, Ruby, PHP and Java somewhere in 2nd place (as popular server side and classoom languages).

JavaScript is the BASIC of today.

Which means, by extension, many of today's JavaScript frameworks are the VisualBASIC of this generation: frameworks that let you use a "child's" language for grown-up work. The reactions to using JavaScript for real applications exactly parallels what people thought about VB when it came out.

Re: BASIC at 50

#20

Post by diydsp »

crusso wrote: post #3

I'll never forget standing in a K/Wal Mart when I was about 12 years old, standing in front of a Commodore 64. My older brother showed me a simple program that he typed in: 10 PRINT "I AM THE BEST!!!" 20 GOTO 10 I fell in love.

There were a number of epic one-liners similar to the above. If anyone is interested in the phenomenon, you can read our book 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1));:GOTO 10 which we give away free at [1] and has LOTS and LOTS of details about the history of BASIC.

[1] http://10print.org/

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