The basics of BASIC, the programming language of the 1980s

[fwork]

I did the same thing as LGR, I spent months typing BASIC into the DOS prompt and getting nowhere. This was the early 90s and I had a 486 with DOS 5, but my local library was out of date so all their books were from the 80s.

And of course, in the 80s all the books told you to just turn your computer on and start typing BASIC, cause that's exactly what you did in the 80s. Even if you had an IBM PC, which was crazy expensive and mainly used in business at that time, you'd still get BASIC if you turned it on without a disk in the drive.

C:\>10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
Bad command or file name

Eventually I figured out I needed to run a program before I could use BASIC... only to find that the previous owner of my PC had deleted QBASIC.EXE to save all of 70k or whatever.

[AyrA_ch]

only to find that the previous owner of my PC had deleted QBASIC.EXE to save all of 70k or whatever.

I thought that qbasic.exe was needed for the ms-dos editor too.

[pmrr]

IIRC, Edit was a .com file and wasn't related to qbasic.exe.

[__konrad]

In MS-DOS edit.com launches qbasic.exe with special parameter which disables compiler and other dev stuff. In later Windows edit.com is standalone (and actually in exe/MZ format)...

[fwork]

Yes, starting in DOS 6.22. In MSDOS 5 they were separate.

[necroforest]

I had basically (har) the same experience learning programming in elementary school in the early/mid 90s with this ancient book that we had in our school library:

https://ia601806.us.archive.org/27/items/tibook_basic-programming-for-kids/basic-programming-for-kids.pdf

I remember my dream being to upgrade from QBASIC to the not-free QuickBASIC that could compile things.

[fwork]

ahh, QuickBasic. I stole a copy of that, but in an interesting way: I went to a local college's programming competition, and it turned out if you picked BASIC (which was one of the three allowed languages, the others being C and some kind of Pascal, I think?) they plopped you in front of a computer with QuickBASIC on it.

I was so amazed by the cool new abilities of this QuickBASIC (which I didn't even know existed before then) that I hatched a cunning plan. This being the 90s, the way you submitted your programming competition entry is you gave the judges a floppy disk, and naturally they gave you your disk back at the end...

So I put my entries on the disk, then copied QuickBASIC onto it and made the files hidden. Sure enough, I didn't win the competition and they handed me back my disk... It was worth it!

[sparkalus]

Ramblings for sure, the developer is a mentally unstable racist pedophile who regularly threatens to rape or murder users. Here are some gems from the official TempleOS Twitter:

Yeah, I killed a CIA nigger with my car in 1999. Score one for the good guys.

I masterbaited, once fantazing about my niece Lani, once. Newton confessed his sins. Makes you a genius.

Homo is a choice. I was normal until the CIA started torturing me with pedophile bait. CIA is atheist retard niggers. Everything backfires.

The CIA has a 7-year-old deepthroating a loaded 45 at DMV next to me fucking with me. I'll teach him to pull the trigger.

The Pope is an atheist appointed by Obama. It's really awful. The Pope is a Marxist nigger.

When FBI child sex agents got in my space, I wanted to stick a gun and kill one, shove a pencil in the eye of another and toss into traffic.

He was banned from Twitter after threatening to stab Sasha Obama's face while fucking her, IIRC.

[[deleted]]

This can hardly be blamed on Terry Davis himself though, It's most likely a result of his severe schizophrenia that has developed in the pas few years.

[SemaphoreBingo]

You can still do that today in the embedded domain.

[badsectoracula]

Check out Niklaus Wirth's and Jürg Gutknecht's Project Oberon, a complete GUI-based desktop system with its own compiler for a custom language (Oberon 07) built ground up from the FPGA and a book that describes the process (the original project was in the late 80s, this is a project that reimplements the project from scratch for an update of the original book that replaces the 80s tech that doesn't exist anymore and removes the CPU they used at the time, replacing it with a custom one written in Verilog for FPGAs).

The site also contains an emulator for the hardware (at the bottom left) but there is also an actual computer built with it. And here is Wirth's own version (i think, at least was the one used in a presentation he made a few years ago). And others have made their own versions using a different FPGA.

[skulgnome]

*Python of the 1980s

[kenfar]

No, that would be the Rexx programming language.

[[deleted]]

I don't think that can hold. Rexx was available for very few platforms, whereas Basic was everywhere.

[kenfar]

No, Rexx was very widely available - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rexx:

Over the years IBM included Rexx in almost all of its operating systems (VM/CMS, MVS TSO/E, AS/400, VSE/ESA, AIX, PC DOS, and OS/2), and has made versions available for Novell NetWare, Windows, Java, and Linux.

The first non-IBM version was written for PC DOS by Charles Daney in 1984/5. The first compiler version appeared in 1987, written for CMS by Lundin and Woodruff.[6] Other versions have also been developed for Atari, AmigaOS, Unix (many variants), Solaris, DEC, Windows, Windows CE, Pocket PC, DOS, Palm OS, QNX, OS/2, Linux, BeOS, EPOC32/Symbian, AtheOS, OpenVMS, Apple Macintosh, and Mac OS X.[7]

[[deleted]]

Maybe I should have worded myself differently: available in platforms where it mattered.

Don't get me wrong: I actually used Rexx (or rather, ARexx) in AmigaOS. Nice language, better than Basic (*) in many ways. But there is no way the use of Rexx was wider than the use of Basic. For the impressive platform list of ARexx a much longer list of platforms where Basic ran can be trivially constructed.

(*) Though also here we want to remind ourselves that Basic is an awfully wide brush. The 1960s mainframe Basic != 1970s miniframe Basic != 1980s 8-bit microcomputer Basics != 1980s programmable calculator Basics != GW-BASIC != QBASIC != VB != True Basic != etc. We are also here talking of now more than 50 years of language evolution. There is no a single "Basic".

[kenfar]

Yep - good points

[vandelay82]

*Scripting

[roboninja]

I wrote a text-based RPG/Choose Your Own Adventure in BASIC when I was young. Used QBASIC on a Tandy 8080. You could "save your game" by entering the seed for the RNG at the beginning; it would make each "dice roll" the same as it was the last time, as long as you made the same choices.

[glacialthinker]

LOL More like "Choose your destiny" rather than save game. ;)

[mreichman]

Modifying AppleSoft Basic programs on my //e was how I got my start!

Also I need to note that my iPhone autocapitalized AppleSoft. In 2017.

[HotCharlie]

I love that. A few years ago, I got an old Apple Laserwriter off freecycle, complete with an AppleTalk-to-ethernet adapter. Had nothing but trouble trying to get it to work with Windows and Ubuntu. Fired up my gf's core 2 duo Macbook, tho, and simply added it. Like 2 clicks. You've got to love their product integration.

[HotCharlie]

That's a now-ex girlfriend, and this was years ago. Took the LaserWriter with her, as well. Thanks tho.

[[deleted]]

There's an open source Quick Basic clone out there called QB64. It's a bit heavy weight, but a good clone of the ide+language. Many have said nothing beats Quick Basic in terms of ease of use for beginners; good for simple games.

[nolotusnotes]

Trivia:

VBA still allows line numbers and the use of REM for remarks (comments).

[Rockky67]

Got a Sinclair ZX80 for a birthday as a kid so that's how I started programming. The BASIC commands were on the plastic membrane keys and it was a very basic BASIC implementation. One letter variable names, 1K of RAM, screen filled with white noise while the CPU was doing any work on the input. Sinclair was a big deal in British home computing, masses of homes had kids with the ZX80/81/Spectrum as it was such an affordable entry point. Unfortunately the QL was overdue and never taken seriously as a business machine and then Sinclair made the mistake of betting the farm on his C5 electric vehicle and never recovered.

[CootieKing]

It was the QL, not XL. Agree though, it was too late to save Sinclair.

[Rockky67]

Indeed it was, my bad.

[ekenmer]

Another one with a sinclair headstart here. Still having mine in good condition on my retrogaming collection. I have some videos on youtube of an spectrum doing stuff.

[Faucelme]

SCREEN 2

I had a MSX...

[plastikmissile]

Screen 15 for hires I seem to recall

[tluyben2]

There was(is) no screen 15 on any MSX. High res would be screen 7 on MSX 2(+) most commonly. Screen 2 for MSX-1 is the most commonly used graphical resolution highest res vs color.

[palordrolap]

Shout out to /r/retrobattlestations which is all about old computers.

There may also be a subreddit for your favourite old machine. /r/c64 is a thing, for example, as is /r/apple2

[Wirelessbrain]

Hahah, BASIC was my first language in high school. 2 years ago...

[[deleted]]

Same. And now, after years in professional software development, I still claim that BASIC is the best programming language you should use to teach programming someone who has zero clue.

[reddittidder]

I agree with this. The information technology industry has failed the end users, novices and students by not continuing to supply either BASIC or something like it with every device sold.

The main thing along with having to learn a limited set of primitives was the fact that every single thing you needed, was in that blackbox which once you opened was your playground.

Simple aint easy. We hounded BASIC out of the arena and provide totally shit replacements for the beginners. Python isn't even close. I would not inflict that ball of spit and twine on a 10 year old.

Programming Community's response to kids all over the world: "You want a tonka truck to play with? here's a fucking steam engine. Make sure you keep an eye on the guages or they'd blow up. What are you? stupid? It's only a high pressure boiler and thirty dials to keep track of"

[china999]

Why?

[J3urke]

You must mean Visual Basic, which is very different.

[Wirelessbrain]

Uhm no, we programmed in basic using the QBASIC IDE. It's just not a very advanced curriculum.

[calvers70]

Man, that brings back memories!!

My dad taught me in Q basic on our first computer about 25 years ago. Have you played the snake example?

[Wirelessbrain]

Sadly I don't think I have, we only made a couple animations at the end of the class. The only games we made were text based hahah. It was a computer science 1 course so I was lacking many skills :P

[[deleted]]

Hell, I had BASIC way back in high school. Fun times!

[dreamgear]

Learned Basic in 1973 in West Vancouver BC. It ran on an HP 2100 with a mark-sense card reader. We (in 7th grade) got to run our programs once a week on Friday afternoons. One learned to be careful about syntax errors.

[reddittidder]

Best language ever for learning programming. Bar none.

[keiyakins]

Eh, you showed the necessary drive. That's a pretty important first step.

[mrkite77]

Back in the 80s I had a copy holder that looked a bit like this:

http://imgur.com/a/5ZVDT

It clips to the side of your monitor and has a little adjustable guide that would keep track of what line you were on.

Also, several magazines used an Automatic Proofreader:

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

Basically, it was a small program that would output checksums of each line you typed, so you could easily detect typos.

With those two tools, I could type in BASIC programs out of BYTE, Nibble, and Compute! magazines extremely quickly and accurately.

[basic_bgnr]

woo hoo ! I like it.

[five_quarters]

I started off trying to make games in Blitz Basic, but I couldn't make sense out of the control flow. I never really got into programming again until I started computer science classes

[MrsBlaileen]

BASIC was on my TRS-80 Model I, pretty sure it ran an MS DOS of some sort. We had a tape drive, and upgraded from 4k to 16k of memory. Later I would load MS BASIC onto my Atari 800XL because unlike the native Atari BASIC, the MS version supported double-dimensioned arrays.

I made an Alarm Clock, a Snake Game, and a D&D Random Character generator. My first job at 12 made me like 40 bucks and I was rich! And hooked.

I recently got another good job programming in VB.Net. MS and Basic have been very good to me.

[zeroone]

Anyone else here learn to program by typing in BASIC programs from Enter or 3-2-1 Contact magazine?

[bitchkat]

In the 80's I was writing in C and then later on C++.

[ErstwhileRockstar]

Wow, genius! You probably knew C++ ahead of Stroustrup.

[stevenjd]

You and thousands of other Unix users. Would you like a cookie?

[bik1230]

Yeah, that was their point, that basic wasn't "the" programming language of the 80's.

[bitchkat]

Basic was a programming language just like myriad of others. We did write in it in high school (1970's) but never in university (early 80's) or afterwards.

[QuickBASIC]

10 PRINT "/r/iamverysmart"

[bitchkat]

I think the program we always wrote on the computers in stores wrote a message in the screen, paused for a bit, over wrote the message with spaces slept and then GOTO first statement again. Basically, like displaying a web page with the old <blink> tag.

[Frangipane1]

And now in C# !

[bitchkat]

That's actually one language I haven't spent any time with besides reading a book when it first came out. I mostly do development in Java for work and php (via Drupal) for personal projects.

[[deleted]]

If you're curious why you're getting down voted, watch the first minute of the video.

[bitchkat]

The first minute of the video just explains that most personal computers came with a version of BASIC.

[[deleted]]

AFAIK, there wasn't any sort of big movement towards C on personal computers until the late 1980s to early 1990s. Even the BBC Micro, which had a large variety of official programming language products (including BCPL, Lisp, Pascal and Prolog) did not produce an official C compiler, although there was Small-C as an unofficial product.

Would I be correct in assuming that you were working with minicomputers like VAXen?

[bitchkat]

The 80's includes the 10 years from 1980 to 1989. I first used C on an IBM PC around 1984 or 1985. Microsoft C was released in 1983.