Programming language BASIC is 60 years old

FORTH doesn’t use semicolons as statement terminators. ‘;’ is a word that ends a word definition. “THEN;” is an undefined word here. Assuming :heart: is defined as a word that returns a true/false value, then you just want

FORTH :heart: IF HONK THEN

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Speaking of the PDP-8, if you have a TSS/8 image, you could possibly run it on this:

https://pdp8.app/machines/active

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Rob please tell us what your image gen prompt for this was. I must know.

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When I have the urge to reminisce about the good old days, I go here:

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

Long story: by the time I got to college, I was already a computer hacker. The college had a PDP-10 which was fertile ground for exploration. By the end of freshman year, they decided they had enough of me, so I was expelled. I ended up taking a job at small minicomputer software development office over the long ago Woolworth store in Cambridge’s Central Square, part of a much larger company in Princeton NJ called Applied Data Research which, among other things, ran a PDP-10 timesharing service. While we had a few PDP-8s, 11s, and Novas in the office, the bulk of the software development and debugging was done on ASR-35s connected to a PDP-10. This involved use of MIMIC, a collection of minicomputer cross-assemblers, linkers, and CPU simulators which were originally a project of the office manager, Bob Supnik. I wrote several components of this system in PDP-10 assembly language, including the tools and simulators for the long forgotten GRI 99 and 909. About 20 years ago I got an email from Bob asking if I held on to any of the listings or paper tapes from MIMIC. I hadn’t, but he found them somewhere, laboriously hand translated them to C, then released them as open source. These are essentially modernized version of the same tools I used 50 years ago. By the way, here is one cool application of SimH (link updated, thanks RickMycroft):

https://obsolescence.wixsite.com/obsolescence/pidp-8

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Inspired by him, someone did a PDP-10.

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I had this and the red sequel.

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Because I’m one of those hopeless fools who loves SQL, I assume the 45 years is because it’s at least good enough.

I’d travelled the BASIC, Pascal, FORTRAN, C nerdolithic path (thanks, @theophrastus ), and finding a language that handled data in bulk without loops was mind-blowing.

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Admiral Grace is only of my heroes. :heart_eyes:

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Here’s all the listings, if you want! Vintage BASIC - Games

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Same.

I love the hush that goes over the crowd in this clip as their minds are blown about what a nanosecond is.

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Some Chipmunk BASIC here:

The idea was to maybe listen to words as sounds so many times you could “read” by hearing these word “chords”. I never listened enough to achieve this maybe impossible concept. This one speeds up with each repetition of the poem, some great glitchiness achieved toward the end.

And this one suffered from some bug that kept some seeming random notes sustained for seeming random periods of time. I liked it, and kept the bugs.

… if it weren’t for side effects, I’d have no effect at all

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I still have a TRS-80 Model I, which also had a “cassette drive.”

@anon36155390 :I think we had that same book in out school library (it had “Hunt the Wumpus” & “ELIZA”). None of the code (as written) would run on my TRS-80 & I lacked the patience to figure out if/how I could make them work.

We have an application at work (though I don’t have anything to do with it) that was & is written in FORTRAN. It’s been running on one system or another for at least 40 years - more than that, I think.

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i try to make sure each function does at least 3 completely different things. it’s all so much more… efficient… that way :scream_cat:

( or, sometimes as many as six, so long as they’re all impossible )

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Fun fact about the NEC V20 (8088 superset) is that the CPU clock frequency can go down to zero. If you want to atomically single-step it, you can drive the clock with a (debounced) push button.

I have one that I’ll probably wire-wrap a board for. maybe with a front panel display, but skip most of the toggle switches.

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I definitely prefer the modern approach of ultra-short functions that do one and one thing only…and so to step through any code you have to go through a stack twenty deep, where all the functions have names like CallsTheOtherFunctionButOnThisObjectNow. That’s not a code smell at all, it’s much easier for a human to understand than a sequence of commands in a list. :roll_eyes:

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Ooh. Hunt the Wumpus. Classic. Hunt the Wumpus, Lunar Lander, Star Trek and Eliza, all classics.

I remember being impressed by a loaner Kim-1 and playing the first two on it. No storage, so that was a bunch of entering hex codes (from a printout) on the thing and enjoying it for as long as it stayed powered on. Wumpus, the words scrolled across a very small LED calculator display. Cool beans. :smiley:

kim-1

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Sure. I had a V20 laptop running on MS-DOS. Now you’re cooking with gas. :smiley:

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