Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/08/04/10-print-nostalgia-20-goto-10-wired-reminisces-about-basic.html
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Coding is a wonderful thing. You should try it.
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BASIC was the only language in use by the patrons of the Byte Shop that I worked at in 1978. There was a wide variety from different vendors. Apple BASIC was the strangest with its PEEK 53814 style graphics operations. But it was also the most popular machine by orders of magnitude. (We were selling machines with serial numbers in the 4000 range.)
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Never did graphics on the Apple, but the way you had to POKE graphics was incredibly annoying on the VIC-20 and C-64. Pixels horizontally adjacent were not necessarily in adjacent bytes. (7,0) and (8,0) were 8 bytes apart.
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the only coding I’ve ever done was in BASIC.
I had PET computers through grade school but we just ran loaded progams. but in middle school we had computer classes that taught BASIC. we were two-to-an-Apple (probably an Apple ][ ) and my lab partner became my bestie, and he fortunately lived a few blocks from me, AND his family had a computer in the basement rec room, on which we would write text games. the only coding I remember is we leaned heavily on INPUT A$, or B etc as we went along.
then I moved to Tennessee and no more coding classes at the schools I went to.
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The BBC Micro’s BASIC was a wonderful thing.
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BASIC is the most consequential language in the history of computing.
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I want to know what that box marked “Facit” does.
It feels like the gap between “wonderful things” Boing Boing posts is increasing. This post is why I habitually still reload. Thank you.
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The language itself wasn’t much, but it sure got a lot of children started in coding. I’m not sure my 12-year-old self would’ve loved and played with Pascal or Fortran nearly as much. So while the technical consequences of the language were barely a ripple, the social impact was pretty big.
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Given that Facit made typewriters, calculator and teletypes, I supposa that is a telex modem.
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I think BASIC was important for generation Gen-X (my own story is closely adjacent to the one in the Wired article) and is the foundation for what I’m doing to earn my bread today, 44 years later.
My teen kids got their start with Scratch and Minecraft command blocks which will probably be their nostalgia points in the future.
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Eh, BASIC…
My first computer language was IBM 360 assembly:
a family friend had taken a course on the IBM360 and gave me all the material - he was really not interested in this stuff at all.
As a nerdy 12 or 13 y.o., I went through it front to back and also did all the exercises - of course, without any chance of seeing them run on a real machine!
I remember it being top quality for clarity and depth, I learnt about boolean logic, hexadecimal, truth tables, Karnaugh maps, the structure of a computer/mainframe and its peripherals, etc. etc.
My second language was 6502 machine code (i.e. manual translation from assembly) for a self designed and built computer, similar to the Kim1.
By that time, I was in high school, and they finally bought an Apple ][ - that was my first exposure to BASIC*.
I frankly found it limiting and ugly, but handy to throw together a quick thing.
Then FORTH, Pascal, Fortran, C, C++, Python, and now I’m getting a bit rusty…
*I was always skipping the religion class to go there, that earned me an “insufficient” mark at the end of the year, but it did not count for promotion, and I also forced the school to correct it, as it was not one of the allowed mark values (“scarce” was, I was just being obnoxious, as teenagers often do…).
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My favorite memory of BASIC was playing Crush, Crumble and Chomp. One of the few commercial games written in the programming language.
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Same here. I was marvelling at this at the time (and still do); how it’s now an ordinary thing for kids to use MIT resources to learn programming.
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Exactly this. BASIC may not have been ideal but it was approachable and widely available. It was on almost every inexpensive computer on the market for a sizeable window of time.
When my family got our first computer in 1985 not only did learning BASIC start me down my eventual career path it also provided my blue collar dad (via a community college night class in BASIC) a great promotion from factory line worker straight to warehouse foreman when his workplace began computerization of their logistics and he was one of a handful of candidates who’d ever touched a computer before.
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Your aforementioned ease and familiarity probably were likely the reasons that it was used in my 1995-ish courses in mineral processing/extractive metallurgy. Regardless of the country of origin or interest in code, most of the (mostly having started uni in 1990-1992) students grasped the syntax easily. This simple-but-not-elegant backbone let us look more closely at and play with the energy and mass balances of processes like calcining and smelting ores.
In the family archives there lie at least one 5 1/4" floppy with BASIC programs (line numbers!) in case I should ever wish to again dive into roasting sulphide ores…
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