BASIC Turns 50
erco
Posts: 20,256
I was 3 when BASIC was born. And the BASIC Stamp has been here for 30 years. As one frog said the other: "Time's fun when you're having flies."
http://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/events.html
http://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/events.html
Comments
But I think the BASIC Stamp just turned 20, not 30 -- Chip was probably in jr. high school 30 years ago!
My best friend and acting teacher, the late Cliff Osmond, frequently asked me about programming because he was fascinated by it, though he never attempted himself. I once quipped, "The language I started with, BASIC, came out of the same university that you did, Cliff!"
20 goto 10
Right you are, JonnyMac. As President Bush said during a televised debate when queried on figures, "Um... I was told there would be no math."
1994 was the year I built my first bot for the very first Trinity Firefighting Robot contest. I knew nothing about micros, but I saw an ad for this new thing called a "Stamp" in Nuts & Volts. The rest is fuzzy history.
Then onto Tandy Color Computer.
A good old clunkety-clunk teletype conected to a far away mainframe via a modem. You know, 300 baud, accoutic coupler and all. Paper tape punch. And BASIC.
It was then that I discovered it can be easier to write programs in assembler.
We were learning assembler at the same time. Not a real assembler language but one that had been made up for educational purposes and ran on a simulator. It was refered to as CG139 if I can recal correctly. It had all the usual opcodes and addressing modes.
Anyway, I soon wanted to write an expression parser. That's a real pain in BASIC.
Never used BASIC since then.
Well except if you can count using it to POKE assembler into memory on those old 8 bitters. Or leave rude messages on the C64's in the stores....
Now that you mention it, It was 1973 for me as well. IBM golf ball printer tied to a IBM/360? (via modem) at a local university.
We never had local paper tape, all our code was save on mag tape at the university. It was quite a pain to call and have our tapes qued up. It took hours.
My dad had access to an IBM 5100 at work and I was able to program in BASIC on that. With the help of my dad, one of my first programs was drawing a circle using SIN and COS. :-)
Math? Heck, and all these years I could've sworn he'd said meth.
Got a better computer in 1978, surplused from the pages of Popular Electronics because the maker had gone bankrupt and for $250 we could get a box that used the TV as a monitor, had 16K RAM, and a built-in tape deck. BASIC came on tapes, so the "good" BASIC that supported floats and strings took most of the RAM leaving little for my program. The port of Tiny Basic left much more room but didn't do much ... until I reverse assembled it and rebuilt it to be still lean but much more useful.
After I left home still didn't have much money so progressed through a Coleco Adam phase (at one point you could put one together with random access tape drives, TV as monitor, built-in usfeful word processing, and at that time very unusual letter quality printer for under $200, when TRS-80, Apple, and Commodore were still commanding nearly $1000 for such a tricked-out system.) When the last Adams died we moved to an Amstrad PCW-512, which we used mainly for word processing, finally moving to IBM world when Amstrad made their own low-end PC clone with a cheap plastic case and proprietary innards. That system got me working in DOS and Windows, still using QuickBasic and then Visual Basic. And I use VB to this day; by modern standards it's lean, well tested, has nearly invisible garbage collection, and has never surprised me with an unexpected behavior.
On the rare occasion I need something VB doesn't do (WHY NO LOGICAL SHIFT OPERATORS?) I have a couple of tools that can create linkable DLL's to get that functionality.
I have looked into a couple of tools like RealBasic and PureBasic which would provide cross-platform support and spring me from the Microsoft jail, but so far the pain of converting 15 years of legacy code much of which I use every day hasn't been worth that advantage.
BASIC entered the popular lexicon:
10 PRINT "Doug is awesome"
20 GOTO 10
with variations on that theme understood by neary everyone. I think it is notable, if shallow.
My first experience with BASIC was on a neighbors TRS-80. We wrote a few programs, and I was amazed! Spent time writing programs I would not get to run for some time while ignoring parts of primary school. Near the end of 8th grade, a friend got an Atari 400 computer, which I started writing programs on right away. Never saved any of those. Was fun to type things in, change stuff, and then move on.
My freshman year in High School saw lots of time on the Apple 2 computers. They had disk drives and color televisions for monitors, some monochrome green screens too. That year a small group of us explored the machines in depth, finding the monitor, mini-assembler, Applesoft BASIC, and all sorts of other things.
That year we learned binary math together on a blackboard, often using the computer to verify things, and we wrote conversion programs too. The big realization was just how limited 8 bit computers really were. BASIC seemed this powerful thing, a bit of magic when compared to what the 6502 could really do!
I got my first computer, also an Atari 400 with cassette drive later that year. Differences in BASIC proved educational, and it was those differences that got me interested in how the machines were made, and how those choices impacted the BASIC, and the overall capability presented to people.
I soon got an Apple 2 of my own along with a Color Computer, just because the 6809 was a lot of fun, and a very powerful 8 bit CPU. Beautiful.
Sometimes basic things really influenced how people would use the machine. The Apple had no special graphics, but did offer 80 column display, cards, and fast storage. Big too, compared to other machines. It was also made to run the CPU without DMA, where the Atari had DMA. Same with interrupts. Apple didn't use them, Atari made heavy use of them.
In BASIC, these things played out in different ways. The Apple was the good choice for more serious programs. Atari was games. To keep things simple.
One could do serious things or games on either machine, and the BASIC interfaces to the tech were important. The built in functions, like sounds or shape tables, etc... often maximized some attribute of the computer, while ignoring toher things!
BASIC was like the OS. Programming was always right there! I would write little programs to solve problems, or generate things. Signals, tables of data, sounds, words. At one point, I realized what parametric really meant, and it changed how I thought of things a lot like how Excel can change anybody in this same, basic way.
Solve a problem once, or write a program and solve classes of problems! For a time, I was into antennas, and with a friend, wrote a few programs related to antennas. Fun stuff!
BASIC was kind of crappy, slow, etc, but it was really easy. Adding assembly language to it chaged things, and BASIC was always the place to just grok something. Type it in, see what happens, move on.
Say what you want, BASIC contributed a lot to computing by making it accessable to people.
I did have a TRS-80, but might have been a bit too old to enjoy fooling around with a device that stored programs on a cassette recorder. So I missed the inside track even though I had programed in Fortran in 1969 with punchcards.
Most of the early years of the IBM PC, I was more interested in it as a business machine and studied tax code and accounting.
These days, Linux makes the world rich is good resources, and I learn more and better. There really isn't much to Basic in the original. Even the original C is rather easy. But when programmers start pumping out version after version, things get tough to keep up with. I jumped from Wordstar to Wordperfect and so with little understanding of all the updates.
Visual Basic is a special form of torture. Along can the BasicStamp and I seemed to see what Da Vinci meant by "small spaces discipline the mind". Big computers just teach you to buy and load big applications and hang on the support line. Microcontrollers confront you with real limits and how little one actually needs to do a proper job of computation.
"Dear Mr. Jimm, here's a little surprise for you from your students. You tortured us with C++, but you have no knowledge in BASIC, so this is why your website was owned. Celebrate BASICs birthday and have fun"
No it has not. BASIC has been dead for decades.
Yes there are many languages that call themselves "something, something BASIC". Like "MicroSoft Visual Basic".
Those "improved" BASICs owe more to ALGOL and FORTRAN than the original BASIC.
Good point! If there aren't line numbers and sigils in front of variable names, then it isn 't BASIC!
Dave
I guess you mean 4K BASIC. As that was the smallest ever made. You can run it on a Propeller chip emulating an 8080 if yo dig back through the PropAltair thread here.
Tiny BASIC was smaller than 4k, you could load it on a machine with 4k and have enough room for simple programs.
http://www.ittybittycomputers.com/IttyBitty/TinyBasic/
C.W.
It's amazing to think that people were expecting money for such silly things back in the day.
[img][/img]http://forums.parallax.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=108083&stc=1&thumb=1&d=1397169310
[img][/img]http://forums.parallax.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=108083&d=1397169310
edit- ah well so much for inline images.....
Dave
Actually loadsamoney.... £286 +vat
36 years ago....
even NOW that seems a LOT!!
(couldn't wait to get my hands on it- never the less)
Dave
Wellll that £286+vat did include the computer not JUST the Basic...
It was so tiny that I wrote a noughts and crosses program as my second program.. it all just seemed so easy.
I learnt assembly by disassembling the monitor rom. I had to input the raw hex after compiling by pencil and paper. And in the very beginning I wasn't able to save the files.
I expect I still have those early scribblings around somewhere.
Getting information was the real problem - no internet then....
Dave
I really liked Tom Pitmann's Tiny Basic, in this case for the Z-80. I wire wrapped quite a few of these. The cool thing was it was very easy to add special commands written in assembler. These made nice controllers. Programs could be written into the EPROM and auto started on power up.
Mike Greens FemtoBasic is quite similar, just uses a 32 bit processor. It's easy to add commands to FemtoBasic also.
Duane J
Do you have any idea how expensive an Apple ][ or IBM PC system was back in the late 70's and early 80's?
Several thousand dollars in back then money.
I got it from a Team Electronics retailer in California. There was a lot of friction between Apple and Team because they were discounting the retail price. Apparently, Apple wanted to dictate the retail price.
BTW, could someone confirm if it Team or Audio King the row was about?
Duane J