[OT] BASIC turns 40 tonight

[lord_mike]

READY
LIST

10 REM
20 REM PROGRAMMED BY MIKE
30 REM
40 CLS
50 PRINT "40 YEARS AGO TONIGHT, A COMPUTER REVOLUTION BEGAN"
60 PRINT "WHEN THE FIRST BASIC TIMESHARING SYSTEM WENT ONLINE"
70 PRINT "AT DARTMOUTH. THE LANGUAGE THAT WAS POWERFUL, BUT"
80 PRINT "SIMPLE TO USE FOR EVEN THE MOST COMPUTER-ILLITERATE."
90 PRINT "IT LATER BECAME THE STAPLE OF THE MICROCOMPUTER AGE."
100 PRINT
110 PRINT "http://apnews.excite.com/article/20040429/D82885100.html"
120 PRINT
120 PRINT "ALAS, THAT WAS A LONG TIME AGO, WHEN 'USING' A COMPUTER"
130 PRINT "MEANT PROGRAMMING A COMPUTER.  PEOPLE ACTUALLY WANTED TO"
140 PRINT "LEARN HOW TO MAKE COMPUTERS WORK FOR THEM. NOW, THEY JUST"
150 PRINT "HAVE SOME GUY IN INDIA DO IT FOR PRACTICALLY NOTHING. <SIGH>"
160 PRINT
170 PRINT "I HAVE MANY FOND MEMORIES OF THOSE LONG AGO DAYS:"
180 PRINT "TYPING IN PROGRAMS FROM COMPUTE! MAGAZINE AND READING"
190 PRINT "ABOUT THE LATEST DEVELOPMENTS IN CREATIVE COMPUTING."
200 PRINT "IT WAS A SIMPLER TIME. A BETTER TIME."
210 PRINT
220 PRINT "SHARE YOUR BASIC PROGRAMMING EXPERIENCES HERE:"
230 INPUT A$
240 PRINT A$
250 PRINT "THANK YOU BASIC, FOR WONDERFUL MEMORIES."
260 PRINT "HAPPY 40TH BIRTHDAY, OLD FRIEND."
270 END

READY
RUN_

[J_K_M_A_N]

I learned BASIC on the Apple ][+ and it was good. A friend of mine and I made a picture by plotting every dot on the screen. We didn't know you could do a whole line at a time. I once wrote a drawing program that was so big, it made things show up on the HGR screen. The memory usage was into the video memory. The good old days.

LIST

10 HOME
20 HGR2
30 COLOR = 15
40 FOR I = 1 TO 100 STEP 4
50 HPLOT 1, I TO I,100
60 HPLOT 1,100-I TO I,1
70 HPLOT 100,I TO 100-I,100
80 HPLOT 100,100-I TO 100-I,1
90 NEXT I
100 END
110 REM BY J_K_M_A_N


P.S.  It might look something like below. I don't remember.  

[mahuti]

I remember building a spreadsheet to track my "albums" in basic.

I also remember building an animation of a UFO coming down from space, extending a ladder... a farmer came out of his barn and gets vaporized before the thing takes back off.

I think that took me 3 weeks... a few hours a day.

I'm a web designer (and crappy programmer) now... sometimes I miss the simplicity of basic. <sigh>

[Daniel270]

I learned BASIC in high school and loved how simple and easy it was.  The unit we had was an IBM PC jr and even then, it was an older unit (I graduated in 1990).

For my final grade in the class, we each had to create a unique program and have it work.  Mine was a program I based on the kiddie book/game called "Mad Libs", where you filled in nouns, verbs and adjectives into blanks to make a funny story.  I had the basic program written in less than 20 minutes and in a day I had the final version.  I wasn't the only "A" in the class, but I was the only one to score 100% for the grade.  

Wish programming were still that simple.


10 REM BYOAC BASIC 101
20 PRINT "Enter 1 or 2"
30 INPUT A
40 IF A = 1 THEN PRINT "BYOAC RULEZ!"
50 IF A = 2 THEN PRINT "BYOAC STILL RULEZ!!"
60 IF A > 2 THEN GOTO 20
70 IF A < 1 THEN GOTO 20
80 END

[J_K_M_A_N]

I learned BASIC in high school and loved how simple and easy it was.  The unit we had was an IBM PC jr and even then, it was an older unit (I graduated in 1990).

For my final grade in the class, we each had to create a unique program and have it work.  Mine was a program I based on the kiddie book/game called "Mad Libs", where you filled in nouns, verbs and adjectives into blanks to make a funny story.  I had the basic program written in less than 20 minutes and in a day I had the final version.  I wasn't the only "A" in the class, but I was the only one to score 100% for the grade.  

Wish programming were still that simple.


10 REM BYOAC BASIC 101
20 PRINT "Enter 1 or 2"
30 INPUT A
40 IF A = 1 THEN PRINT "BYOAC RULEZ!"
50 IF A = 2 THEN PRINT "BYOAC STILL RULEZ!!"
60 IF A > 2 THEN GOTO 20
70 IF A < 1 THEN GOTO 20
80 END

I graduated in 1990 also but we had Apple ]['s in out high school. It was because of BASIC that I got into Visual Basic. You should try it. I wouldn't recommend VB NET though. It is pretty different. VB 5 or 6 is good though. Good luck.

J_K_M_A_N

[Tailgunner]

Heh, my high school had one Apple ][ in the library, the computer science department had TRS-80 systems. In college we had Apple ][+ systems, on which I learned a custom BASIC version created by my teacher. The teacher emphasized structured programming, and his BASIC version was tweaked to limit our ability to write spagetti code.

I remember writing a little program that drew a grid like J-K-M-A-N's above, then randomly threw "darts" at it. Finally it'd attempt to determine Pi by counting the number of "darts" that hit the circular edge of the grid.

The other program was a fractal generator, it'd take four days to draw a low-rez 4 color picture of the Mandelbrot set.

[Dartful Dodger]

10 ? "I MISS MY TI-99/4A."
20 ? "SOMETIMES I STILL WRITE 'GO TO' AS ONE WORD."
30 END

[zaphod]

10 ? "I MISS MY TI-99/4A."
20 ? "SOMETIMES I STILL WRITE 'GO TO' AS ONE WORD."
30 END

That was my first system.  I spent countless hours coding complicated text games (ala Zork) and some crude graphical games on it.  That was where my love of programming started.  I can still imagine the sound of the cassette tape loading the programs into memory.

[ErikRuud]

The first high school that I went to had five hard copy terminals that connected to a time share system at one of the local colleges!

You could code programs in BASIC, but you had do do it on punch cards and then put them through the card reader to load them.  This was 1979 - 1981!  Chicago public shcools

I went to a private high school for the last two years (1981-1983)  They bought about a dozen Apple ][e's and ran a programming course.  By that time I had done so much basic programming at home on a Commodore PET and a VIC-20 that I was teaching the teacher stuff he did not know!

[HaRuMaN]

God this brings back memories... I learned how to program BASIC on my first computer, a Commodore 64.  Nothing too fancy, just some simple animations and some mad-lib type programs.  Still a load of fun, though...

LOAD"*",8,1

ahh... those were the days.

[ErikRuud]

I skipped the C64 and got a C128 when they came out.  Of course it ran in C64 mode most of the time.  I never used the CP/M mode.

I actually wrote a front end for all the disks that I had accumulated with games on them.  You would pop in a disk,  type in the usual LOAD"*",8,1 and a menu would come up listing all the games on the disk, then you would choose one and the program would run the game.

It even had a configuration file so you could set which games needed ,8,1 and which ones needed ,8,xxxxxx on the load command