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.
In 1977, I bought a brand new Honda Civic for $3100
In 1982, I bought a brand new IBM PC for $3000
In 1984, I bought a brand new Macintosh and Imagewriter for $3500
My first experience with Basic was a second hand Sinclear ZX-81 back in 1982 or something. Think I also got a 16k ram backpack too. What I do remember most clearly was the one chance only when trying to save the simple programs on a cassette recorder. That means I only could do a limited number of lines of code because the risk of loosing the whole program was to big. Later I bought a "real" keyboard too, but that was just before the big 50% prize drop of the CBM-64.
I've got my CBM and then spent so many late nights of programming, mostly farm-related programs as computer games never has been my sort of things. Eventually I added a color monitor and a floppy disk drive! Big things. I do think I still keep those things somewhere except for the disk drive that was later sold to a relative.
Cant' recall the price of a Comodore PET but it was a lot.
That's why us kids were building our own 8 bit computers at home.
Now, my comment was about the price of BASIC. Bill Gates open letter to hobbyists introduced the idea that we should pay for everything and killed the previous culture of sharing software that had existed for decades before. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Mindrobots, I see those old Hondas every now and then. The one that Bubba Smith ripped the seat out of in Police Academy. Turbo Pascal and Turbo C were awesome. I purchased Turbo Pascal 7 but Turbo C was free.
Heater, I had heard of the PET when I had my C64 but I didn't know what it was until years later. Commodore some wonderful engineering but Woz was still the master.
Imagine if Woz had worked for Commodore.
Something that's easy to forget from today's perspective is that in the 1970's, even after microprocessors became available, it took a crapload of glue chips to make them work. I have a COSMAC Super ELF framed on the wall and in order to support what amounted to a microprocessor trainer with an 1802, 512 bytes of static RAM, and a 6-digit 7-segment display and 16-key hex keypad, it has over 50 IC's. Most of the common CPU's of the period had custom chips available, often almost as expensive as the CPU, to reduce this support burden. The genius of the Sinclair was that it used an ASIC to radically reduce the chip count and circuit board size needed to support the Z80 and get crude video out of it. Static RAM was hideously expensive and only available in very small power-hungry form, and dynamic RAM was also hideously expensive (a bank of 16Kx8 dynamic RAM was over $100 for my first computer) and in addition to requiring refresh often required four power supplies, which had to be brought online in just the right order lest the chips literally explode. My first surplus cheap computer did the power supply sequence thing by leaving two of the supplies on all the time, with the on/off button only cycling 5V. Some folks who thought they were being smart using a power strip to turn their Interacts on ended up having to get intimate with a soldering iron to fix the damage.
The idea that you can just hook a battery up to a propeller and get it to do stuff seems almost insane.
Good point! If there aren't line numbers and sigils in front of variable names, then it isn 't BASIC!
Gotta have line numbers to be BASIC. And if you didn't see the need for RENUM, you weren't writing large enough programs (not that RealBasic had a RENUM command).
I first encountered BASIC on the SDS 940 in 1968 or maybe 69.
My first exposure to BASIC was in ~1968 in a Systems Engineering course in college. It was BASIC through a TTY and was shown as a curiosity. Our primary digital programming in the course was in mainframe Fortran. (That course also included simulations using electrical circuits and analog computing). My project was heat flow during solidification of a metal slab in both FORTRAN and analog.
My next experience with BASIC was with the Compucolor II, and 8080 based appliance computer in 1979. It has MS BASIC in ROM, 32 kB of user ram, a 64x32 color monitor, and program/data storage was on 5-1/4 inch floppies. No tape drive was supported. The floppies held 53kB and since formatting was completely in software, the disks were reversible. The system cost about $1800. An external floppy drive could be added.
It was a fun computer. It had an easily accessible file system with either sequential or random access files, fairly sophisticated graphics, and its BASIC allowed simple inclusion of machine code instructions. Since BASIC was built in boot time was about 2 seconds.
There was also multiple language support. The company sold an 8080 assembler, text editor and MS Fortran (~$30), and members of the user group ported Tiny C and FIG Forth. I also interfaced some of the early BYTE magazine projects to the CCII' 8080 bus including the speech synthesizer.
Unfortunately, the company ran into a few problems. First was the manufacturer of the floppy drive discontinued that model and the drivers (in ROM) had to be revised and required new hardware and ROMware. So there were 2 models incompatible at the ASM level. Then the FCC issued its regulations on EMI. The original CCII in its plastic TV case with ribbon cable attachments to the Keyboard and external floppy resulted in a noisy machine. There was even software to use a nearby AM radio as a special effects sound system. That required a major change in the computer (one piece unit) that added significant cost. And of course the inexpensive TRS-80 with the Radio Shack distribution system and IBM PC killed any chance for long term success with the very proprietary system.
Unfortunately, after about 10 years my CCI power board went pop/smoke, and the guy who tried to fix it popped something else. After that I did some BASIC programming on Tectronix computers at work, but became more a user of software rather than a developer --- until I recently met the Prop.
My first computer was an IMSAI 8080 (S/N 0013). I eventually had the thing fully populated with 64K, yes, K, on 8 S-100 boards which made a dandy room heater. Wish I still had the IMSAI as they are going for north of $3,000 on the collector market..
I was part owner in a very small company called "Real Time Micro-systems" and our very first product was a basic interpreter called "Tarbell Basic" for some guy named Don Tarbell. (You'll be telling your age if you remember Don Tarbell.) Eventually Don sold the development to some high school kid whose first act was to delete ALL the comments in the source code !! Don called us and asked us to help the kid out. Sorry was our reply... Don't know if it ever got into production or not..
Started with TRS-80, PET and Apple ][ on Basic. My own first computer, an atari 800xl, had BASIC but I upgraded it to Basic XL, which had nice IO commands and could 'pre-assemble' code text into tokens for 4-5X speed boost. After that on Atari ST, I used GFA BASIC, which was a nice 'line-less' structured BASIC, and of course all the IBM/DOS packaged versions. Oh, don't forget the great BASIC Bean wrote for the SX, SX/B. (Still use it!)
The first compute I met I person was a Wang2000. I was around 10. The school my father was working for got one. For some reasons eluding me now I was there with him. And while all those grown-ups where taking care of unpacking and all that things I was supposed to sit somewhere and do not disturb them.
So I grabbed the handbooks and read them while waiting for dad. This went on for a couple of days. Finally them where not able to do anything with it and started to read the manuals also. You know Teacher teach and not learn. So they decided that - since I am the only child available - I will type in them listings and they will do the important stuff like what they will use the computer for. Worked fine for me but just for a couple of days/weeks.
Then I had not had access to any computers for AGES as it felt. About 2 years(?) later my school got a TRS-80, a computer-group and some shared access to the TRS-80. Leaving school and starting to drive Big Rigs around Germany did not help either to get access to computers. Then I got one Atari 130xe. I was delivering and removing stuff from Fair-Grounds as part of my job and them sold it to me for 'cheap'- because it was not working. Turned out to be a broken power switch. So I had a COMPUTER. wow. Needing a Cassette recorder also sucked another paycheck a month later...
I was still earning my money as Truck Driver but I was a Programmer now. Rare species in Germany at that time. I turned down 2 or three job offers because of being in COBOL but I finally gave in. So COBOL it was. And somehow still is. Once in a while.
As most of people being in this programming business for decades I had usually to change either the language to work with, the used framework, the programming conventions or all of it with each new job or sometimes even project. It is what it is. Another tool in the Tool Box as Mike G. put it nicely. Overall a Programmer is nothing but a Handyman with another set of tools.
And without grooking BASIC just by reading those WANG manuals SOURCES I was hooked. The manual was in English. I was a 10 years old German speaking guy with about 2 years English as second language. 'Peter Pan plays with Billy Ball' stuff.
So these BASIC SOURCES changed my live. Even if I am older than it...
I am reading too much posts from potatohead. Mine get longer and longer also now ...
Comments
In 1982, I bought a brand new IBM PC for $3000
In 1984, I bought a brand new Macintosh and Imagewriter for $3500
I really miss that Honda Civic!!
I've got my CBM and then spent so many late nights of programming, mostly farm-related programs as computer games never has been my sort of things. Eventually I added a color monitor and a floppy disk drive! Big things. I do think I still keep those things somewhere except for the disk drive that was later sold to a relative.
They were stunningly cheap. Prior to that an Intel micro-processor development system would cost you about ten thousand pounds!
http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/731/Intel-MDS-80-Microcomputer-Development-System/
We had three of them in our lab
Cant' recall the price of a Comodore PET but it was a lot.
That's why us kids were building our own 8 bit computers at home.
Now, my comment was about the price of BASIC. Bill Gates open letter to hobbyists introduced the idea that we should pay for everything and killed the previous culture of sharing software that had existed for decades before.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Heater, I had heard of the PET when I had my C64 but I didn't know what it was until years later. Commodore some wonderful engineering but Woz was still the master.
Imagine if Woz had worked for Commodore.
The idea that you can just hook a battery up to a propeller and get it to do stuff seems almost insane.
Gotta have line numbers to be BASIC. And if you didn't see the need for RENUM, you weren't writing large enough programs (not that RealBasic had a RENUM command).
I first encountered BASIC on the SDS 940 in 1968 or maybe 69.
My next experience with BASIC was with the Compucolor II, and 8080 based appliance computer in 1979. It has MS BASIC in ROM, 32 kB of user ram, a 64x32 color monitor, and program/data storage was on 5-1/4 inch floppies. No tape drive was supported. The floppies held 53kB and since formatting was completely in software, the disks were reversible. The system cost about $1800. An external floppy drive could be added.
It was a fun computer. It had an easily accessible file system with either sequential or random access files, fairly sophisticated graphics, and its BASIC allowed simple inclusion of machine code instructions. Since BASIC was built in boot time was about 2 seconds.
There was also multiple language support. The company sold an 8080 assembler, text editor and MS Fortran (~$30), and members of the user group ported Tiny C and FIG Forth. I also interfaced some of the early BYTE magazine projects to the CCII' 8080 bus including the speech synthesizer.
Unfortunately, the company ran into a few problems. First was the manufacturer of the floppy drive discontinued that model and the drivers (in ROM) had to be revised and required new hardware and ROMware. So there were 2 models incompatible at the ASM level. Then the FCC issued its regulations on EMI. The original CCII in its plastic TV case with ribbon cable attachments to the Keyboard and external floppy resulted in a noisy machine. There was even software to use a nearby AM radio as a special effects sound system. That required a major change in the computer (one piece unit) that added significant cost. And of course the inexpensive TRS-80 with the Radio Shack distribution system and IBM PC killed any chance for long term success with the very proprietary system.
Unfortunately, after about 10 years my CCI power board went pop/smoke, and the guy who tried to fix it popped something else. After that I did some BASIC programming on Tectronix computers at work, but became more a user of software rather than a developer --- until I recently met the Prop.
Tom
I was part owner in a very small company called "Real Time Micro-systems" and our very first product was a basic interpreter called "Tarbell Basic" for some guy named Don Tarbell. (You'll be telling your age if you remember Don Tarbell.) Eventually Don sold the development to some high school kid whose first act was to delete ALL the comments in the source code !! Don called us and asked us to help the kid out. Sorry was our reply... Don't know if it ever got into production or not..
Getting old sucks.....
Mike B..
You are right. But it beats the alternative.
The first compute I met I person was a Wang2000. I was around 10. The school my father was working for got one. For some reasons eluding me now I was there with him. And while all those grown-ups where taking care of unpacking and all that things I was supposed to sit somewhere and do not disturb them.
So I grabbed the handbooks and read them while waiting for dad. This went on for a couple of days. Finally them where not able to do anything with it and started to read the manuals also. You know Teacher teach and not learn. So they decided that - since I am the only child available - I will type in them listings and they will do the important stuff like what they will use the computer for. Worked fine for me but just for a couple of days/weeks.
Then I had not had access to any computers for AGES as it felt. About 2 years(?) later my school got a TRS-80, a computer-group and some shared access to the TRS-80. Leaving school and starting to drive Big Rigs around Germany did not help either to get access to computers. Then I got one Atari 130xe. I was delivering and removing stuff from Fair-Grounds as part of my job and them sold it to me for 'cheap'- because it was not working. Turned out to be a broken power switch. So I had a COMPUTER. wow. Needing a Cassette recorder also sucked another paycheck a month later...
I was still earning my money as Truck Driver but I was a Programmer now. Rare species in Germany at that time. I turned down 2 or three job offers because of being in COBOL but I finally gave in. So COBOL it was. And somehow still is. Once in a while.
As most of people being in this programming business for decades I had usually to change either the language to work with, the used framework, the programming conventions or all of it with each new job or sometimes even project. It is what it is. Another tool in the Tool Box as Mike G. put it nicely. Overall a Programmer is nothing but a Handyman with another set of tools.
And without grooking BASIC just by reading those WANG manuals SOURCES I was hooked. The manual was in English. I was a 10 years old German speaking guy with about 2 years English as second language. 'Peter Pan plays with Billy Ball' stuff.
So these BASIC SOURCES changed my live. Even if I am older than it...
I am reading too much posts from potatohead. Mine get longer and longer also now ...
Enjoy!
Mike