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BASIC turns 60

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Re: BASIC turns 60

#61

Post by skissane »

SoftTalker wrote: post #16
ajross wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots and lots of BASIC was used in production for routine IT-ish tasks at the dawn of the personal computing era. It was the only meaningful way to implement custom tasks until the mid-80's when environments like Turbo Pascal showed up. For years and years technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's and then writing their own BASIC to glue together whatever automation they needed. Was much commerci…

There was some business use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Basic Was popular with some smaller companies for their internal custom systems. Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax.

> Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax.

COBOL never had an "IBM tax", because almost every non-IBM vendor had a COBOL compiler. If you didn't want your COBOL from IBM, you could buy it from DEC, HP, Wang, Unisys, NCR, Honeywell, Microsoft, Micro Focus, Watcom...

That said, if your COBOL was running on an IBM platform, you often were using lots of IBM proprietary features (e.g. CICS) which made it hard to port to another vendor–and that could indeed be an "IBM tax". But that's wasn't due to COBOL in itself. If you limited yourself to standard COBOL, and avoided IBM proprietary stuff, moving your COBOL app to another vendor didn't have to be difficult

BASIC attracted business users because it was viewed as simpler and easier to learn, because it could run on smaller machines, because (often) using an interpreter instead of compiler resulted in faster development (no edit-compile cycle).

Re: BASIC turns 60

#62

Post by kstrauser »

I worked as a hotel night auditor during college. It was great for me: I did actual work from around 11PM to midnight, then loafed around until around 6AM when it was time to set up the breakfast table.

A big chunk of my job was doing tedious manual edits in the guest management software that tracked who was in what room, what phone and pay-per-view charges they'd racked up, etc. It occurred to me to peek at its database file and see if I could pull any useful data out with automation. The DB turned out to be a flat file of fixed-length records. The DOS PC had a copy of QBasic on it and I used a bunch of trial and error to map those records to types, and then I could loop across the records to get interesting data out of them.

Long story short, I ended up with a system we'd run nightly to correct misspellings, build reports of which companies did the most business with us and how recently, identify regular guests who hadn't been around in a while, and a thousand other little things that made my job much more pleasant and my boss extremely happy.

It would be much easier to recreate that program today in a nicer language. I didn't have a nicer language available, though, and while it wasn't pretty, QBasic got the job done.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#63

Post by chasil »

kstrauser wrote: post #62

I worked as a hotel night auditor during college. It was great for me: I did actual work from around 11PM to midnight, then loafed around until around 6AM when it was time to set up the breakfast table. A big chunk of my job was doing tedious manual edits in the guest management software that tracked who was in what room, what phone and pay-per-view charges they'd racked up, etc. It occurred to me to peek at its data…

The AWK Programming Language was published in 1988, and indicates:

"Aside from these limitations, however, awk should be useful in any environment; in particular, it runs on MS-DOS. Further information is available from Addison-Wesley."

It likely was not easy to find, and I hadn't heard of it until 1990.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#64

Post by amelius »

Jtsummers wrote: post #38
chuckadams wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never heard of the original BASIC being compiled in any way, JIT or otherwise. Far as I know, the most it did was tokenize keywords into one or two bytes, something every other BASIC interpreter took up as a matter of course.

http://dtss.dartmouth.edu/scans/BASIC/BASIC%20Compiler.pdf Dartmouth BASIC was compiled.

Compiled can mean many things. For instance it can mean that only the parsing is done at compile time, leaving the rest for runtime.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#65

Post by chasil »

skissane wrote: post #61
SoftTalker wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some business use. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Basic Was popular with some smaller companies for their internal custom systems. Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax.

> Had some similar capabilities as COBOL without the IBM tax. COBOL never had an "IBM tax", because almost every non-IBM vendor had a COBOL compiler. If you didn't want your COBOL from IBM, you could buy it from DEC, HP, Wang, Unisys, NCR, Honeywell, Microsoft, Micro Focus, Watcom... That said, if your COBOL was running on an IBM platform, you often were using lots of IBM proprietary features (e.g. CICS) which made i…

A free copy of DEC's original COBOL compiler for the VAX can be found in the VMS 1.0 image at this site:

https://www.wherry.com/gadgets/retrocomputing/vax-simh.html

Modern GNU COBOL can be found at this site:

https://www.gnu.org/software/gnucobol/

A great deal of the COBOL that we use relies on OS2200 DMS, originally from Univac.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#66

Post by johannes1234321 »

chasil wrote: post #63
kstrauser wrote: post #62

I worked as a hotel night auditor during college. It was great for me: I did actual work from around 11PM to midnight, then loafed around until around 6AM when it was time to set up the breakfast table. A big chunk of my job was doing tedious manual edits in the guest management software that tracked who was in what room, what phone and pay-per-view charges they'd racked up, etc. It occurred to me to peek at its data…

The AWK Programming Language was published in 1988, and indicates: "Aside from these limitations, however, awk should be useful in any environment; in particular, it runs on MS-DOS. Further information is available from Addison-Wesley." It likely was not easy to find, and I hadn't heard of it until 1990.

In a pre Internet time a lot harder to learn about, fetch and learn than QBAsic, which was saprt of DOS and had a quite good online help system.

Many alternatives existed, but non that were so approachable on DOS (and many other systems in their variant)

Re: BASIC turns 60

#67

Post by johannes1234321 »

jonplackett wrote: post #36
rbanffy wrote: post #4

It'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.

For kids who grew up with smartphones and other visual devices it's extremely hard to build something "sexy" in the first few weeks with basic.

You need some visual thing for the appeal.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#69

Post by kstrauser »

chasil wrote: post #63
kstrauser wrote: post #62

I worked as a hotel night auditor during college. It was great for me: I did actual work from around 11PM to midnight, then loafed around until around 6AM when it was time to set up the breakfast table. A big chunk of my job was doing tedious manual edits in the guest management software that tracked who was in what room, what phone and pay-per-view charges they'd racked up, etc. It occurred to me to peek at its data…

The AWK Programming Language was published in 1988, and indicates: "Aside from these limitations, however, awk should be useful in any environment; in particular, it runs on MS-DOS. Further information is available from Addison-Wesley." It likely was not easy to find, and I hadn't heard of it until 1990.

There's zero chance I personally would have been capable of building that same software in Awk, even if I knew of it, and even if I knew how to get it onto that non-networked computer that didn't have any removable media in common with what I had at home.

Re: BASIC turns 60

#70

Post by dole »

skissane wrote: post #19
ajross wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots and lots of BASIC was used in production for routine IT-ish tasks at the dawn of the personal computing era. It was the only meaningful way to implement custom tasks until the mid-80's when environments like Turbo Pascal showed up. For years and years technically-savvy small businesses were buying Apples and PC's and then writing their own BASIC to glue together whatever automation they needed. Was much commerci…

> Was much commercial software written in BASIC? No, very little. There was a huge amount of commercial software written in BASIC dialects such as classic Visual Basic and ASP, Pick/BASIC, HP Business Basic, Wang 2200 Basic, DEC BASIC-PLUS, etc. Boring business software you would likely have never heard of but which was (and in some cases still is) essential to running all kinds of different businesses. I used to wor…

Suffered from a few very large non-starts in attempting to port it all to browser-agnostic JS and other frameworks by offshored teams. Couldn't capture the same UX and layouts; too much proprietary business logic in the background that less and less people have knowledge of. Unconvincing demos, bad sales, sunk cost. Good guess.
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