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BASIC turns 60

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Another dinosaur footprint post.

When I got started in this ‘computer’ thing, one had to have some idea about programming.  Computers operated off the keyboard and software was rare, buggy, and not standardized.  If you had a specialized need, you wrote the program yourself.

And that was usually in BASIC (Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code).  Most computers came with a version of BASIC. With that, a fairly competent user could write simple programs to do just about anything.

Apple’s little Macintosh didn’t.  I had to buy it from <<Coff!>> Microsoft.  But with that capability in hand, I went on to write utilies ranging from simple (convert fractions to decimal feet and inches) to rather more complex (ham radio logging program with duplicate search).

I can’t remember the last time I opened up a BASIC program.  I still occasionally get into command line stuff but between purpose-built commercial software and office suites, there just hasn’t been a need.  Like my old slide rules, BASIC goes in the drawer to take out and look at from time to time to remember our roots.

And I also played a bit with Pascal, Forth, and C.  But again, those were just curiosities.

12 thoughts on “BASIC turns 60”

  1. You could tweak the autoexec.bat file on a coworker’s computer to turn the screen upside down, say, every 2014 keystrokes. A simple reboot would correct it till he typed another 2014 keystrokes. (one of the first benign viruses).

  2. OM-
    I used to run around at night with a floppy disk filled with ‘interesting’ little programs. A favorite counted keystrokes, then locked the screen and keyboard out and displayed a message stating “You hard drive is now being formatted”.

    MC

  3. I studied under Prof. Conrad Kurtz at Dartmouth … the developer of Basic. Then Fortran was our language. If you think about it, Basic is pretty much Fortran without the compiler directives.

  4. Got called to work on a computerized sawmill in the early 90s. Opened up the console to review the code and got:
    1 REM Trust the Lord in all things.

  5. Unclezip-

    When diving into somebody else’s code, that’s a completely valid sentiment. I’ve been involved in programming many things related to industry, PLC’s (programmable logic controllers), protective relays, etc., and the one thing I tell people is “Comment your code”. Second thing is “Don’t get cute”

    MC

  6. BASIC existed long before PCs. When GE was testing their new-fangled multi user operating system (Multics) in Phoenix circa 1968-70 they had a version of BASIC available that required line numbers and LET statements… Dad worked in marketing and could bring home a portable teletype for my brother and I to play on on the weekends. 300 baud acoustic coupler and all…

  8. Ha. Fractions to decimal, SAE to Metric. Got to be able to do it in your head, on the fly. How else you gonna watch baseball! My kids are instant calculators, because I raised ’em on baseball! The sport of stasticians! They KNOW this shit now. In their very souls. 1/6 is .161616. 1/7 is .1414…
    We, the teachers, have to deal with the less informed. (I am not a teacher, save in the sense of sensei). But I do recall an advanced High School student asking ‘how many quarts are there in a gallon?’

  9. You ain’t lived ’til you’ve coded Assembly Language!

  10. Yeah, inserting snippets of batch got me a few looks, never charged nor convicted, but got de-caff a couple of times. They showed little mercy. Best config on memory in the late ’80s was booting up with 592kb. Not overly stable, but booted, ran a simple game.

    Spent a lot of money on building systems to run distributed computing programs (think F@H). Very challenging.

  11. You haven’t lived until you’ve TRANSLATED a Control Data assembler program running under SCOPE into IBM 360 assembler WITH the appropriate JCL deck. One single job submission card in CDC becomes roughly a box of cards in JCL…or did circa 1969 anyway. Program under CDC: 101 cards; IBM 360, 2100 cards. All run through the patented, highly efficient read-and-occasionally-rip-lengthwise IBM card reader.

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