The BASIC Programming Language Turns 60 (arstechnica.com) 107
ArsTechnica: Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
My first programming language (Score:5, Interesting)
I bought a book on BASIC when I was 14. I had no access to a computer, so I wrote programs with pen-and-paper and "ran" them in my head. Then at 15, I went into Grade 10 at a high school and had access to a Commodore PET. None of my programs was correct.
That started me on a 30-year career as a software developer, from which I've only recently retired. Good memories.
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80's (Score:2)
Not sure when I got into computers, but it was really young. My parents bought me, what is probably, the very first V-Tech computer thing with an LCD display and membrane keyboard, about the size of a large hardcover book. I played with it every day for hours.
Then my Dad got me a VIC-20 from a garage sale, probably from someone upgrading to a C64. Taught myself basic from the "Learn Basic" manual it came with, with examples on tape. My dad played Omega Race on it for hours as well.
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Taught myself basic from the "Learn Basic" manual it came with, with examples on tape. My dad played Omega Race on it for hours as well.
Omega Race!
My first real computer on game, on a VIC20 as well. TBH, it was a fairly terrible game and a pain to play - I really hated those mines (that you could shoot, IIRC, but they were tiny and hard to hit, except by colliding into them). Didn't the game also randomly rotate the color scheme, or am I confusing it with some other ancient game? But in any case, it was the first real computer game for me, so it was a big thing. Of course, upgrading to C64 a few years later opened a whole new world of compu
Re:My first programming language (Score:5, Funny)
Back in MY day we had to program in binary. And we didn't even have a keyboard to do it with. No punch cards either. We just had to shout it at the serial port.
Kids these days....
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Back in MY day we had to program in binary. And we didn't even have a keyboard to do it with. No punch cards either. We just had to shout it at the serial port.
Re:My first programming language (Score:5, Funny)
You have serial ports? We had to sort the electrons by hand and push them down the wire one at a time!
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Re:My first programming language (Score:5, Funny)
You had electrons? We had to affect quantum states by sticking cats into boxes.
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I dunno, I never checked. It's been a several decades by now, but I left them a can opener.
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Mel loved the RPC-4000
because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
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My first program was in 360 Assembler on a System 360/40 with 128K core memory. My second was in Applesoft on an Apple II+. Even as a kid, I knew it was going to sound cooler to start with the antique mainframe.
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My first real computer exposure, through the IBM school discount obsolete equipment time warp, was 1620 Model 1. Core memory for this model was I believe in an oil bath with a heater, and required upwards of 20 minutes to get to operating temperature after cold power-on.
Arithmetic in Model 1 was by table lookup from tables loaded into specified memory locations. I believe Model 2 used an actual ALU rather than table lookup.
1620 required 1 memory location per decimal digit; 2 memory locations per alphanume
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No. It also used the table lookup. Our computer had 20,000 decimal digits of individually adressable core memory and you could clear it to all zeros with one instruction. I wrote a little program that fit inside the 80 digits of input that cleared core one digit at a time and stopped when it hit the record mark at the end of the arithmetic tables. It took 30 seconds.
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My first home terminal in college had core memory and an acoustic coupler. The thing probably weighed 40 pounds. The last screen you were on reappeared when you plugged it in and powered it back up.
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10 PRINT "HELLO"
20 GOTO 10
on one of the 2 TTY terminals Good times
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Used to love doing this in random Radio Shack stores that were trying to sell some version of a TRS-80.
Only I was very young at the time, so "HELLO" might have been replaced with something slightly less polite.
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Ahh.. Wang... They opened an office in Cologne, Germany. They couldn't understand why none of the International people didn't want to go to Wang Cologne.
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We did that with front panel switches. Somewhere I worked on a computer where the boot sequence was done with toggle switches.
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Back in my day the only joke we had was a boring "back in my day" thread that acted as a piss-poor substitute for comedy by the congenitally humourless. And we didn't like it then either. Didn't stop anyone from repeating it all the time.
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at 15, I went into Grade 10 at a high school and had access to a Commodore PET.
Me too. That was the moment I became a computer geek.
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Before any of us even imagined we'd have a computer or a course on it, we "programmed" in text books. The language was mostly GOTO, but might even have the occasional conditional as in, "If you like cheese turn to page 56 otherwise 103". Typical applications were insulting the teacher's appearance, as in "for a picture of the teacher, turn to page 45", where there was a picture of a gorilla.
This was of course, not permitted which made us low-key black hat "hackers". In private school the penalty for this
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Enter our deferred retirement plan in 5 years, work 2-3 more years and really retired at 63 or so...
Started in '82 with BASIC on the TRS-80
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ZX80 at home. Sharp MZ80K at school, some time around 1980. Still coding, now in Elixir mainly.
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I did my first Basic on the ZX Spectrum 128K. The only languages I had learned prior to that were Fortran and COBOL - both from text book with no actual hands-on at all, as my college did not have the computer with those languages. Believe it or not, at that time I used to think that real computer professionals programmed in assembler and that languages like Basic and Fortran were for ordinary users. Only after I joined a software company I realised that assemblers are only for niche purposes. Much later, I
While I wrote my first programs in BASIC... (Score:2, Interesting)
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Unlike you, I did like BASIC, but I also played around with the HES MON assembler on the Commodore 64. The coolest thing about the assembler was that...you could scroll up on down! No need to "LIST 10-100" or something like that. Also, you could pick a spot in memory and disassemble whatever was at that location. That taught me a lot about how the OS was coded.
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Formative (Score:4, Interesting)
My first computer was a ZX Spectrum, and I did a lot of programming in its BASIC. That sort of set an expectation for how programming languages should work.
When I program in modern languages, I still have more trouble with concepts that weren't in BASIC. Object-oriented programming does my head in (although part of that is also the insanity that Microsoft brings to languages like VBA and Powershell).
I recently had the urge to use a GOTO statement to break out of a loop.
GOTO (Score:5, Funny)
But did you ever use a GOTO statement to intentionally create a loop?
I recall, as a smartass kid many years ago, running a loop on a bunch of display computers in some store so they kept printing to the screen "I am overpriced for what I can do".
Yes, I was the same kid that liked to wind up all the mechanical alarm clocks at the department store and set them all to ring at the same time 10 minutes later.
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That reminds me, here's a playlist [youtube.com] I've prepared earlier for visits to Apple stores.
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I was as bored as you were in the stores, and used to go to all the display PCs and add "ctty null" to their autoexec.bat files.
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I was as bored as you were in the stores, and used to go to all the display PCs and add "ctty null" to their autoexec.bat files.
That's pretty mean! I'm trying to remember - wasn't there some simple way to bypass autoexec.bat and config.sys on startup? A function key or something like that?
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Mashing Ctrl-C like a maniac during the boot cycle would do it.
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> "I am overpriced for what I can do".
You must have grown up in a nice neighbourhood. Where I lived, we'd write "Dixons is Shit".
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OO has some useful features for organizing and re-using code, but it's mostly stuff you can do without the other parts of OO. The rest of it is dubious at best. It lead to some massive bloat as well, because although it is possible to write efficient code in OO languages, that's not how most people are taught to use them.
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Object-oriented programming does my head in
That's the thing; it's perfectly possible to write clear, understandable code in any language, and also headache-causing, horribly obfuscated code in any language.
The odd GOTO has nothing on "modern", "reusable" code when it comes to the level of convoluted-ness possible,
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>and also headache-causing, horribly obfuscated code in any language.
"A good programmer can write bad FORTRAN in *any* language!"
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My first computer was a ZX Spectrum, and I did a lot of programming in its BASIC.
My first computer was a TI 994/A. I wrote a primitive Pac Man game with one ghost in it. It took all 4k of RAM to hold and run. Saving and loading it via audio cassette.
It also somewhat negatively affected my thought processes. Pointers were MUCH harder than they needed to be after my experience with BASIC.
Definitely Inspired Me. (Score:5, Interesting)
In Grade 8 I walked into the brand new computer Lab in my junior high school. I was faced with 8 Commodore PETs, with integrated green screen monitors and external cassette drives. When booted up, BASIC was on the other end of that blinking cursor.
I was... home.
BASIC was my introduction to the skills that would fund my entire life. It was the gateway drug. And I'm grateful.
The VIC-20 launched it all for me (Score:5, Interesting)
I got a Commodore VIC-20 in High School and learned to program in BASIC. My biggest achievement was a simple Defender-like game where I could actually fly a ship around in front of a moving background and fire a laser...all in under 3.5K of RAM with lots of room to spare.
High School was programming in BASIC and FORTRAN on a DEC PDP-11, and college was programming in several languages a PRIME.
Fast forward to my first job post-graduation from college where I programmed in VAX BASIC supporting an unsupported ERP system.
Over the last 35 years, I've programmed in several languages and after a long stint in IT support and management, I'm back to programming in RPG and loving it.
But it was BASIC that got me interested in programming.
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I got a Commodore VIC-20 in High School and learned to program in BASIC. My biggest achievement was a simple Defender-like game where I could actually fly a ship around in front of a moving background and fire a laser...all in under 3.5K of RAM with lots of room to spare.
Any chance you kept a copy? I would totally type that in and run it, just like I used to back in the day. Don't worry, I'll hit somebody else up to print it out on tractor-feed paper for me :-)
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Sadly, no. That would have been...let's see...about 41 years ago. Seriously, though, the VIC-20 was stunning when it came to programming graphics and sound. Not as much as the C-64, but still, what you could do in under 3.5K RAM on the VIC-20 was amazing.
GWBASIC (Score:5, Interesting)
An 8086 in 1988 or so. Dad wouldn't let us touch the family PC, so I got up in the middle of the night to sneak. I couldn't figure out how to get to the games, so fished out a manual that said "GWBASIC" and accidentally wrote my first GWBASIC program. What fun! Haven't stopped for 36 years now.
Happy birthday, BASIC! :))
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My dad brought home a TRS-80 Model III in 1980 when I was 12. I was allowed to use the computer but like you, got up in the middle of the night so I could use it more! I was writing my own BASIC programs within a month.
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Those were the days!
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You said it! I wish computing was as fun now as it was back in the 80's. It was an adventure, not torture like using Windows 11. COmputers at the time either used BASIC as their OS or operating systems included the BASIC language in their suite of tools like GWBasic and QBasic. Microsoft could have done the right thing and included a free stripped down version of VisualBasic starting with Windows 95 but sadly dumbing down the computer masses was (and still is) one of their agendas.
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I honestly don't know WTF they're thinking with Windows 11. All the changes just seem pointless.
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They are for the end-user. But hat sweet, sweet pilfered user data is a gold mine for generating cash mostly from ad revenue and selling your information to 3rd party asshats.
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I don't believe they're "pilfering" any user data other than via websites, like everyone does. I am aware of non-personally identifiable app telemetry data. Do you have any information about that?
Sorry, I don't drink the Kool-Aid on that exactly, but I am sure there's something I haven't heard.
Basic (Score:2)
Qbasic was when the real fun started. It had
it depends (Score:2, Interesting)
Computer literacy has become a bimodal distribution -- you can run a Unix computer for $15 plus a scrounged up keyboard and mouse, and so many resources are available online. At the same time casual users don't even know what a folder is on a computer anymore.
I'd say though that what's online is horrendously structured and not of very high quality. It used to be that knowledge was conveyed in books and magazines and there were plenty of magazines filled with interesting technical information -- from PC Mag
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If that was true then people would still be buying books.
Qbasic (Score:1)
Old? (Score:3)
20 FOR X = 1 TO 20
30 PRINT "THANK YOU FOR MAKING ME FEEL OLD!"
40 NEXT X
Moo (Score:2)
My grandfather had a CoCo. Whenever I visited (which was fairly often as my grandparents were less than an hour away at the time), I worked through the tutorials in Getting Started with Color BASIC [colorcomputerarchive.com] . Eventually, I got a TI-99/4A at home, and then an Apple IIe. All of those put me on the path to where I am today, 40+ years later.
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Moo? Reminds me of a player on the old Unreal game servers back in the day. Anyhow, I programmed the crap out of CoCos back in the day. My biggest project was a packet radio BBS system that required 4 diskette drives to operate. The thing was huge. Computing back in the 80's was so much fun.
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I also got a TI-99/4A as my first machine. Fun story about "on the path:" Texas Instruments actually made a bunch of those machines in Johnson City, TN. I moved there in the late 90s and got a job working for Siemens, who had bought the industrial automation division of TI a few years prior, which included the Johnson City plant. I had a desk in a lab in a large electronics manufacturing space that was repurposed as a cube farm and was privileged enough to work with some amazing people, a few legit grayb
Original Dartmouth BASIC was a compiler (Score:3)
In its most traditional form, BASIC is an interpreted programming language that runs line by line
The original Dartmouth BASIC [wikipedia.org] was a "compile and go [wikipedia.org] system.
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Yup. My first coding language. (Score:2)
On a PDP-11/05 which is still standing (but not running).
Then to Apple ][.
It was the stepping stone for many coders of a certain vintage.
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Decwriter II printing terminal, mark-sense card reader, an acoustic coupler modem, and a Western Electric rotary dial telephone talking to a DECsystem-10 run by the county-wide educational consortium was my first experience with computers. My first program would calculate how old you would be in the year 2000. More syntax errors than lines in that one, but I wrote it just guessing, with no instruction in BASIC. Later on it was the pair of Apple ][s in school. In College it was a DECsystem-20, and my dad
Plankalkül (Score:1)
It all really started with Plankalkül, which was invented in Germany prior to 1945. To catch up, the victorious Allies forbade Konrad Zuse and all Germans from making, and using computers.
The ultimate BASIC program (Score:1)
"over the next six decades"? (Score:2)
Like many folks here I did start coding in basic in the 80s as a kid but I can't remember a single time I used basic after the mid 90s. Did anyone really start coding with a variant of basic in the past 10 years?
I do think the language family had its time but I would guess the run ended at least over 10 years ago.
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I believe TI-BASIC i
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I keep coding MS Access VBA occasionally - wonderful tool for developing useful applications on the desktop.
Creative Computing BASIC Computer Games (Score:2)
I typed in (and modified) most of the games in this book: https://www.atariarchives.org/... [atariarchives.org]
Also, BASIC was a far better teaching language than Pascal
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"Also, BASIC was a far better teaching language than Pascal" - I agree with this, to a point. Pascal added forced variable declaration which is something that BASIC definitely needed (OPTION EXPLICIT anyone).
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Disagree. The fact that BASIC didn't have that is one of the things that makes it a better teaching language. Teaching beginning programmers Pascal is like teaching first graders analytic geometry before you teach them arithmetic.
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For small programs (under 100 lines) creating variables "out of the blue" is fine. When you start getting into any larger those undeclared variables will bite you in the rear. I taught programming for years. I used QB64 (a modern 64bit implementation of QuickBasic) and Python. For introductory courses I used the simplicity of QB64 but mandated that all variables be declared (the IDE recognizes OPTION _EXPLICIT). Try reading code that was written without variable declarations. It's one of the reasons (along
Early days progression for me (Score:2)
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TRS-80 Model I -> TRS-80 Model III Level 2 Basic-> TRS-80 CoCo Extended Color Disk Basic -> GWBasic -> QuickBasic -> VisualBasic for DOS -> Turbo Pascal -> VisualBasic for Windows -> PHP -> QB64 -> Python and now just mainly the Phoenix Edition of QB64 for fun and Python when I want to hurt myself.
BASIC hacks (Score:2)
To join in the BASIC nostalgia, I remember running BASIC programs on the Apple II in high school and thinking that loops were really slow. Looking at the how BASIC lines were stored as a linked list and how the GOTO and GOSUB line number targets were searched sequentially, I figured out that rearranging the order of lines using PEEKS and POKES allowed fast GOTOs and GOSUBs. Not a super practical solution, but it was fun.
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Applesoft, TRS-80 Level 2, and most of the other built in were version 2 of Microsoft BASIC (or the 6502 port of that).
Until version 5, iirc, memory was searched serially, rather than using a table.
So jump to a high line number for setup, then back to midrange for general execution, with frequently used subroutines at low line numbers.
Version 4.52, then later 5, were common on CP/M.
BASICA/GWBASIC was pretty much an 8086 port of 5 with extensions.
PRINT GOTO (Score:2)
10 PRINT "RUN FOREVER"
20 GOTO 10
Basic programs were usually written with uppercase commands which the lameness filter doesn't like
Could it still be king? (Score:2)
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In the PC world in MS-DOS, we had both compiling and pointers in BASIC in the latter part of the 1980s. Borland's TurboBASIC. Even QuickBASIC had some sort of pointer facilities, as well as a compiler.
Today we do have the open-source FreeBASIC compiler, which has pointers, and is object-oriented. In many respects it's like C or simplified C++ with wrapped in a BASIC dialect. It can interact with C libraries, and some C++ libraries and ships with some header files for these libraries. I have used it for
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Back in the day.. (Score:2)
Before we had our own computers, converting programs from 101 BASIC Computer Games to FORTRAN to run on an IBM 1130 "mainframe".
QuickBasic still lives. (Score:2)
The QB64 Phoenix Edition language is a modern 64-bit implementation of QuickBasic: https://qb64phoenix.com/forum/... [qb64phoenix.com] and an excellent tutorial exists for it as well: https://www.qb64tutorial.com/h... [qb64tutorial.com]
50 GOTO 10 (Score:2)
Department of Redundancy Department (Score:4, Funny)
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning
As opposed to 4am in the afternoon?
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RPG character generator in BASIC (Score:2)
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You started a character generator for Rolemaster in 1982? Is it complete yet? ;)
When did BASIC *stop* being a 1st language? (Score:2)
I learned Dartmouth BASIC on DTSS and later had Commodore PETs at school and an Apple ][+. In college, I had DOS and GW-BASIC. I also learned Fortran, Pascal and .BAT files.
At the end of college, I had started using spreadsheets. Faster than calculators for engineering formulas and quicker to get up & running than writing programs that saved/loaded data, etc. That's probably when I stopped using BASIC. I went on to C then Unix tools on DOS before going all Unix with shell, perl, python, etc.
Ed Dijkstra was right about BASIC. (Score:2)
TSIA.
BASIC was for kids (Score:2)
My language progression was:
FORTRAN (1965)
assembler (3 different machines: Poseidon guidance compter, SCC 660, RAC-32)
COBOL
ALGOL
LISP
and then BASIC. My reaction to BASIC was: too simple, too limiting.
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BASIC allowed many kids to get started in programming.
In secondary (high) school in the UK in the early 80s, one autumn a few kids came in for the new term in sports cars (cheap and old, like MGs and Spitfires).
It turned out they had sold ZX Spectrum games to a publisher and bought the cars with the money.
BASIC (Score:2)
I learned in the early 1980s as a 12 year old kid that BASIC was more of a concept than an actual language or standard. Every home computer (C64, TI-99/4A, TRS-80, etc) had a different BASIC with different syntax (and some were VERY different). Some, like the Amiga Basic (interestingly, written by Microsoft) did not even use line numbers, and instead used labels (pretty advanced for an interpreted language in 1985 running on 256k RAM and a 7 MHz CPU).