50 years of BASIC, the programming language that made computers personal

JakeBullet70

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I did really like Quick basic 4.5 that got me hooked on compilers.
Well wait, the blitz compiler for the commodore 64 was fun...
although the 64 really had a terrible basic. Basic 7.0 on the C128 was much better
 

Tom Christman

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Like Klaus, my first programming was in Fortran using punch cards. We had access to the Marquette University IBM 1620 and the punch card machines between 9 PM and 6 AM. We would write (punch ) the cards and submit them in the morning, and then pick them up in the evening with either a PASS stamp or FAIL stamp....No Debugging. The 1st program was a change machine. Basic came after I graduated and found a job in medical research at a Veterans Hospital where they had a Wang machine with Built-in Basic and 8K of memory!!!!! along with 8" floppys and a printer. We did wonders with that machine although a relatively simple linear regression project would take 2 days to process and print out the data. Later on we acquired several Radio Shack TRS80 (trash) machines. The good old days????
 

Cableguy

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I first started with a ZX Spectrum ++ with a tape "drive", And got hooked on qbasic and assembler.
Made a clone of the bananas throwing monkeys game and of the snake... I guess we all tried those...
Then I got an Olivetti pc1 with floppy drive but no HDD... A real buster... Started doing some cad with it.
Then came my first real PC, an unbranded 486dx2 at an astonishing 350mhz! My pc1 was a 88mhz.
Then I stumbled on win mobile... And thought, it would be nice to create something to run on this...
So I found b4ppc... Its been awhile now...
 

Jim Brown

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ZX81 was the starting point for me, with its infamous 16K 'wobbly ram pack' expansion.
Then came the C64, MSX, Amstrad CPC 464, Amiga 500, Amiga 1200, and finally the PC.

Seeing the QBasic screen reminded me of when I was doing a business administration course. Once I discovered that QBasic was installed on the PC I spent most of the day coding, which was infinitely more appealing than the boring business admin stuff.
 

IanMc

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I started with the Sinclair ZX81 (which came out in 1981.. hint in the name there :) )

sinclair_zx81.jpg


The book that came with it was really well written and it was really due to the book that I got hooked.

I remember when I first discovered the Goto keyword that the idea of a universal machine first struck me.

10 LET A = 1
20 PRINT "Hello my name is ian and I've said this "; A; " times."
30 LET A = A + 1
40 GOTO 20

The keyboard is a membrane keyboard which you had to painstakingly press very securely to get the function that you required sometimes having to do a combination of several keys, one painstaking press after another to get the desired function.

Programs could be saved to an ordinary cassette recorder.

The display was your TV, no sound, no colour.

It had 1k of memory.

Sometimes it would do a 'whiteout' and your program was lost.

Great fun.
 

Jim Brown

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Sometimes it would do a 'whiteout' and your program was lost
Indeed. My brother and I spent hours entering some 16K Frogger game code from a magazine. Unfortunately, a butterfly decided to flap its wings 400 miles away causing enough vibration for the 16K wobbly ram pack to completely crash the machine. Arrgh!
 

dlfallen

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Like Klaus and Tom, I got my start also in the late 60's. My first language was PL/1, pretty much a dialect of Fortran. When I got heavy into statistics I wanted a language that did matrix algebra. The school's Fortran compiler did not have the matrix algebra library, but the BASIC language installed on the IBM 360/40 did. Thus the reason for learning BASIC.

After graduate school I acquired a TRS-80 and, of course, programmed it in BASIC and assembler. I had a government job (State of Washington) and we had one of the first microcomputers - an IBM Model 1. There was little usable software available initially so I wrote my own word processor and data applications using the built-in Microsoft BASIC. The machines were slow then, so some math routines were coded in Assembler for performance reasons.

I'm retired now, but still love to play around with B4PPC and B4A.
 

warwound

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The ZX81 was my first computer.
Could only afford the basic (1KB) ZX81 - no 16KB ram pack.
Saving programs to cassette tape was hit and miss - mostly miss!
But it was fun!
The ZX81 had a 'fast' mode which if enabled would disable screen updates while processing - that used to make entering and running BASIC a bit faster but the ZX81 was never a performance machine.

I moved on to an Acorn Electron, then an Amstrad CPC6128.
The CPC6128 was my first computer to have a disk drive and 'proper' external monitor, no need for a TV.

I lost interest in computers after leaving school in 1984 then around 12 years ago picked up a used Commodore Amiga A500.
Bought my first PC around 7 years ago - 32MBs memory and a 300Mhz Cyrix M2 CPU, this was Windows 98 era stuff.
The PC got me back into programming and i taught myself a bit of Delphi and VB then moved onto web development.
Web dev work all dried up and left me looking for things to do, i tried learning android programming with eclipse but it was too steep a learning curve.
I found Basic4Android and that's kept me busy for the past 2 to 3 years :).

Martin.
 

IanMc

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Concepts in computing seem to keep coming around, it would seem that nothing that you have learned in your long careers was not worth the learning.

For example.

When I built a modem for the commodore 64 out of an AM7910 chip and got on the X29 PAD out to the ... packet switched system ... before the internet little did I know that today I'd have to remember my RS232 for communicating with a bluetooth module.

Whatever you have learned my friends be it Hex or Octal, be it Fortran or Cobal it is never wasted.

As an engineer you just have to engineer your interest back towards programming because the world is big enough that there will be many users interested in your creations.

Remember that burning desire you had to know what a computer can do and rekindle it.
 

Computersmith64

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Back in 1989 I lost the sight in my right eye while working as a mechanic. This prompted me to look for a career change & so naturally, having never even used a computer at that point, I decided I would take a programming course. Before I started the course, I borrowed a friend's Commodore64 & started teaching myself some basic BASIC by hacking a jet fighter game that was installed on it. During the 6 month full-time course, I learned Pascal, COBOL & C - & then promptly got a job as a VB (v1) programmer. My first "real" PC was a 386-SX with RAM & HDD so small that I have permanently blocked the details from my memory! I worked as a VB programmer for about 6 years & during & since then have been though all the various versions of VB, including .NET & also dabbled with various flavors of BASIC, like QBasic & GW-Basic - & now of course, I use the wonderful Basic4Android! I have also recently taught myself (*gasp*) Objective-C & ported Yahtzee!, Yahtzee! Plus & Poopy Sheep to iOS - but that's another story!
 

Jmu5667

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Wow, a trip down memory lane, started with a Commodore c-16, languages, cbasic,qbasic,gwbasic,asm,Cobol,clipper,lisp,c,visual basic, pro-iv, b4a,b4j..most interesting project was a network os called dosnet. I remember when a 40 mb hd was huge, and the max ram was 640kb. How technology has changed, ha, writing this post on my phone in bed :)
 
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KMatle

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I was 10 and in a store there were those "typewriters" with some sort of a tv connected with. Some day a guy was typing some words in it and the "tv" showed amazing things. So I asked him what he was doing. Think it was a Commodore VC20.

After a hard fight with my parents ("what is this expensive toy for?") I got my first computer:

Atari400_01_full.jpg


After that: C128, Amiga 500 (with GFA-Basic!), Amiga 2000, etc...

But my dream was this (in the 80ies):

BBC_Micro_Front_Restored.jpg

Never got one :(
 

Beja

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In early seventies I started with Sinclair ZX81, that used the Zilog Z-80 microprocessor.
Then I received a gift from a friend in 1986 that was IBM PC XT (for eXtra-Technology!).. It had
256 Kilobytes of Ram and 10 MB of Hard disk space. It came with BasicA.. then later I used
GWBasic, followed by Qbasic, and then the first BASIC compiler called QuickBasic 4.5.. that
was the last version of MS DOS versions of basic running under DOS 6.22. Then came Visual
Basic 1, for DOS.. it was a compiler too but the interface was completely different.. The buttons
were a little better than boxes. Then went all the way through Visual Basic 3 (VB 2 missing-in-action).
Starting from mid-nighties, Microsoft stopped capitalizing BASIC and it started to write it Basic, which
meant that Basic is no more a beginner's code, but a mature OOP language.
One thing guys and I bet none of you had seen it.. when the computer operator used 8 cables and
plugged them one by one in sockets a panel to prepare a byte.. the pushed the send button to write
the letter "A" for example.. then unplugged them and repeated the same for the next letter! something
like the first telephone exchange operators long time ago. then saved their work in flash USB, sorry I
mean in a heavy punched card box.
 

nwhitfield

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I think for me it must have been 1981 or so, with a VideoGenie, which was essentially a TRS-80 clone with a built in cassette deck. I graduated from there to the RML 380Z, which was a great bit of kit - complete with a software front panel that you could type hex codes into. Mostly BASIC, but also some Z80 assembler on the 380Z - I still have my Rodnay Zaks "Programming the Z80" on the shelf in the office, and I think it was my fondness for that that made me not quite so interested in the BBC Micros when the school starting getting lots of those - they were ok, and repeat-until was a cool thing to have, but otherwise, nothing so thrilling.

At Uni we were taught Modula-2, with diversions into Prolog, PDP-11 assembler and a brief glimpse of Fortran, Pascal, but no C (86-89; it was still a bit of a fringe interest). A little bit of BBC BASIC on my much loved Cambridge Z88 (which was sadly pinched during an office move in the mid 90s).

Then I got into Perl, PHP and assorted bits of UNIX/Linux tinkering, with diversions into the scripting for stuff like FileMaker and DataEase, before coming back to BASIC a few years ago when I wanted to start doing cross-platform work for Mac and Windows, when it seemed like one of the simplest ways was to use Real Studio, and that then lead me to Basic4Android when I wanted mobile stuff.

Having not done BASIC for a long, long time, the thing that had changed most - though I suppose coding for the web should have prepared me for it to a degree - was the fundamental way programs are constructed now. Back when I started, a program ran, did things, then stopped, or used GOTO to pop up its menu again.

Procedures and new data structures like Maps were easy to grasp, from things like functions and associative arrays in Perl, or the modules of Modula 2. But I think for me, the hardest part in coming back to BASIC after so many years away from regular programming was the whole event driven nature of modern coding.
 

alienhunter

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i started in 1990 with a Schneider cpc "locomotive Basic" then atari st 1040 then 486 where i got visual basic 6 and i got stuck with this until i found B4A , the only reason i started was that I got a cheap tablet and could not find apps that I wanted , but b4a opened a new world for me :)
I am still coding in VB6 what Java cannot handle with what i need for my job


CPC464-1.JPG
 

Beja

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@nwhitfield
Thanks for reminding us with the good old days of the Z80 era.. Steve Ciarcia, Circuit Cellar and
Midnight Engineering!
The following images were my sacred books in the mid-eighties.
(programming with solder machines)..
 

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nwhitfield

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I used to love reading some of that proper hands-on computing in Byte; I remember they created a system based around the Hitachi 64180, which was a Z80 clone with extra IO on board, almost a SoC type thing. I would have loved to have the pocket money to do that.

I always felt the Z80 assembler a lot clearer to understand than the 8080 (and the 6502!). And of course it's still found in a lot of things today, in its embedded forms.

One of my first bits of hackery was a phone dialler program I wrote in BASIC on the RML 380Z. We didn't have sosphisticated things like tone dialling in the UK then - mid 80s, I guess - but there was a cassette control accessory box for the 380Z, which had two relays, one for a 'play' deck and one for a 'record' deck. I used the relay from one channel (since the system we had at school was floppy based, with CP/M 1.4B) wired across the phone line with a 2k2 resistor in series, to simulate pulse dialling.
 
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