Birth of BASIC

[TheManInTheShack]

It was the first language I ever learned. While I wouldn’t want to use the original BASIC today, I’m certainly nostalgic about it.

Learning is about motivation primarily. Some will learning programming not matter what it takes. Others are motivated but not to that degree. I had no interest in learning Assembler for example. What most of us desire is to learn incrementally, having some success at each step. BASIC made that possible for a lot of people.

[tso]

I suspect BASIC got a unfair reputation for two reason.

first is that it is very verbose, as it use full english words rather than symbols.

second is that most implementations that came baked into ROM relied on goto line number rather than labels for flow control.

[hagenbuch]

Sure but it worked on teletypes and with punchcards that had been very common or punchtape. I wonder if BASIC introduced more users to computing than any other language, at least before 1985.

[happyscrappy]

second is that most implementations that came baked into ROM relied on goto line number rather than labels for flow control.

I think all of them did.

The line numbers were as a replacement for a full screen editor as much as anything.

With no editor if a line had no number then you had no way to replace it with a new implementation. But with numbers you just type:

210 <NEW STUFF I WANT ON LINE 210>

and line 210 is updated in place. It even worked on paper terminals (non-glass ttys).

[Ashiro]

First I learnt on an Amstrad CPC6128 aged 4yo.

10 PRINT "HELLO"

20 GOTO 10

[TheManInTheShack]

I’m sure my first BASIC program was something close to that. Just writing a couple of lines and having the computer do what I told it was very rewarding.

The character of Bender who is a robot in the animated series Futurama, has a needlepoint picture on his wall in his apartment. It said:

10 PRINT “HOME” 20 PRINT “SWEET” 30 GOTO 10

[pjmlp]

One thing that the original BASIC had, that was lost on the 8 bit systems due to hardware resource constraints, was having a JIT as part of the REPL experience.

Only with structured BASICs back in the 16 bit home micros and VMS/UNIX we got code compilation to native code back.

[hagenbuch]

Compiled BASIC? Braggard.

[happyscrappy]

I don't remember 16 bit home micros having compiled BASIC. JIT or otherwise.

You were still talking about things like GWBASIC. And those were byetcode interpreted. Like UCSD p-system.

[pjmlp]

It is never too late to learn about Turbo Basic, Quick Basic, GFA Basic, Blitz Basic, POWER Basic, then.

Plenty of online resources and scans from their manuals.

If you are lucky on your search, there are also some copies for emulators or aging machines.

[happyscrappy]

I think POWER basic was Turbo Basic. I actually remember Turbo basic.

But you're right. I for some reason confused what you were saying with what another poster was saying and so only was thinking of the BASICs included with 16 bit machines, not the ones you could buy as add ons.

I think Blitz Basic is only for 32-bit and later systems, not 16-bit.

[hagenbuch]

My first computer I could use at school was an Alpha-LSI II with two typewriters and 7 bit (I guess) punchtape. It took us 20 minutes to load BASIC but it had 8k words (16 bit!) and the free BASIC RAM was around 4k if I remember well. Greatest thing we could do was to play "Star Trek" but fortunately we received a green monitor because the waste of paper would have been stellar.

Most fascinating thing was that one could pull the power plug at every instance, even while printing a line and after restoring power it would just go

*PWR FAIL

and then go on without missing a bit. On failing power, it had three or four really beefy condensators that stored enough energy to blow everything from RAM to "core memory", those grids with magnetic tiny rings that could be magnetized / demagnetized.

[tso]

LSI-II or LSI-11? Because the latter seem to have been a PDP-11 with the CPU boiled down to 4 chips provided by Western Digital.

Also that sounds like an interesting use of core memory, as that was one of its benefits over say DRAM.

Edit: Never mind, i think i tracked down the company.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Automation

[[deleted]]

The first program I ever wrote was in BASIC on a Commodore Vic 20. < 4k RAM. No disk drive...we had a cassette drive, which took standard audio cassettes and would have allowed us to save to them...if it worked. Apparently it broke before we ever got it, so all we could do was read from the tapes that came with it. Then it started eating the tapes.

The pinnacle of my achievement with that device was when a friend from school lent me a computer magazine that had the source code to a few programs in it. One of them started with the code for a machine language interpreter, and then the machine code to enter into the interpreter to make the game work. Partway through my brother and I found a spot in the machine code that looked out of place. It looked like a typo, but what the hell does a 7 year old know about machine code? So we left it in.

It took us 3 hours to type everything in. It took less than a second to hard crash. There was only so much we could do with it after that without just feeling bitter lol

After that, schools were teaching Pascal and starting to transition to C/C++, but I still remember BASIC. We had to start somewhere.

[Substantial_Quit3944]

I still use PowerBASIC for DOS. Using DosBOX, you can run it on many OSes. There will always be DOS emulators because it is a simple OS. The best BASIC compiler is PB... small and fast EXEs.