BASIC computer language turns 40

The Salt Lake Tribune ^ | April 30, 2004 | J.M. Hirsch The Associated Press

[Reeses]

Here's an interesting mention about Bill Gates and Paul Allen: Chronology of Personal Computers

Paul Allen wrote his BASIC interpreter for the first personal computer, the Altair, without having access to one. When he loaded it from paper tape, it worked flawlessly on the first try, as did his paper tape loading program!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Another site of interest:

Kosmoi.com

[jalisco555]

Ahh, yes, the good old days (NOT) when you were nearly finished sorting 20 or so trays of punch cards on an 082 and then dropped a tray

Yes the good old days. I remember a final project that required me to write a language translator. I couldn't get the %$#&* thing to work. Finally, around 3 AM, after staring at the printout for hours it hit me. Two of the punch cards were reversed in order. I think I laughed and cried at the same time.

I told this story to my kids and they gave me a blank look. As far as they're concerned I might as well have been talking about riding a horse and buggy!

[jennyp]

I remember pulling an all-nighter at the computer center when some poor guy dropped a shoebox full of punch cards. They scattered everywhere. The guy was almost in tears and the rest of us truly felt his pain.

OK, class, today's life-lesson is: "Always keep a Flair handy so you can draw a diagonal line across the top of your card deck"!

[Fedora]

Wow, the PET was the first computer I ever used.

Me, too :) Later we "upgraded" to the Vic-20 and Commodore 64, the latter of which my brother still has and toys with sometimes :)

[larryjohnson]

Learned Fortran in 62.After then I hire computer experts.

[pt17]

I told this story to my kids and they gave me a blank look. As far as they're concerned I might as well have been talking about riding a horse and buggy!

LOL, sometimes my kids get smarty-pants about how good they are with VB, HTML and javascript, I tell them about 360 assembler, registers and the likes and get the same blank looks. The good news is I can still outcode them in javascript, though, and that gets their attention.

[jennyp]

Ah, the Radio Shack TRS-80 (aka "Trash-80").

Strangely enough, I became an accomplished Z80 assembler programmer because I was frustrated by my TRS-80's lame BASIC only allowed two-character variable names, while the assembler let you use a whopping 6 characters. I actually found it easier to write programs in assembler for most uses than in MS BASIC.

Once I disassembled the TRS-80 BASIC ROM and tried to follow its logic to see how it was written. Man, what a tangled pile of spaghetti that code was! Now, Gates & Allen DID accomplish something impressive in fitting a BASIC interpreter into 4K (later 8K) of ROM memory, but still - uuuuuugleeeeeee!!!!

[DoctorMichael]

Wow! This is the language I learned to program computers in school eons ago. Time flies.

[m87339]

I tell them about 360 assembler

Ahh, the good old days -- programming in BAL was for real men -- even the women who did so were real men!

16 fixed point registers and almost all of them spoken for. I had to write a stacking macro simulator (I think that was on the 370) since I kept running our of registers.

[LibWhacker]

. . . my first computer experience writing programs in a BASIC predecessor, FORTRAN, entering my programs and data on punch cards.

I used to love those old cards and didn't want to give them up, and when rumors began circulating that a keyboard and monitor were someday going to replace the whole punch card process (punch your cards, give 'em to the guy at the counter, come back in a couple of hours to pick up your printout and find out whether your program had bombed or not), I just couldn't figure out what the heck the monitor was for, lol!

[unixfox]

You have an endless loop. Lets make it better.

10 FOR X=1 to 1000000
20 PRINT "JOHN F. KERRY IS NOT FIT TO BE PRESIDENT"
30 REM *** NEXT LINE=BELL
30 PRINT "^G"
30 NEXT X
40 PRINT "END OF RUN, NO MORE ATTEMPTS!!"
50 END

[unixfox]

Oops, my line numbers are wrong. I guess that's why I was never that good at basic!!

[pt17]

programming in BAL was for real men

LOL, yes indeed. There weren't no sissy pants twits, who couldn't understand BALR, around back then. No gobs of memory to get liberal with. No siree.

[Atlas Sneezed]

I remember my first computer, an HP110, with the battery-powered disk drive and battery powered Think Jet printer.

[duckman]

Lots of good memories back in those days. I remember writing 1401 machine code and having it linked as overlay since core storage was only 8K. Then a great thing happened we got a 1410/7010. 100K big deal! Don't tell me I'm old, please, don't tell me. PCP wasn't even a glimmer in IBM's eye yet.

[fjsva]

I've tried to explain to my son and nephews how I programmed in FORTRAN 77 on punch cards in college.

My son wanted to know how you could tell if the games worked when you didn't have a monitor...

[Calvin Locke]

...Microsoft, said his company owes much to BASIC>>>

I ported the MS Basic interpreter to a proprietary 8085 based OS back in 1980.

The coding was pretty bad, and except for obvious inefficiencies that I came across implementing the I/O
drivers, I left well enough alone.

[reagan_fanatic]

Mine was a Timex Sinclair 1000, BASIC, hooked to the same peripherals. It had a whopping 1K memory

LOL! That was my first computer as well. I was completely enthralled by it, and used it every waking moment I had. I remember hours of entering basic commands by hand out of a computer magazine. Loved it!!

*Sigh* Sure brings back the memories!