It’s time for him to GOTO
I owe my career to being able to casually write code at home in BASIC on a cheap computer (C64) before I was old enough to drive.
IF HEARTBEAT < 0 GOTO …
I used BASIC to leave nasty messages to our IT Nazis when they would snoop our PCs after hours.
Let’s hope he will GOTO heaven.
If heart beating Then live Else dead
Rest In Peace, Eugene.
Back in the 80’s I accidently left my programming textbook at home. My dad had bought me an old TI-99 computer to play around on while I was taking the class in high school. He started flipping through the textbook, and by the time I got home, he was a billion times better at it than I ever was (basic programming). We both had good times trying to outdo each other. Lost dad in 91, and it’s memories like that that keep me going. Cheers to Thomas Kurtz, and thanks for the memory (all 256 bytes of it). :)
Bill Gates should goto his funeral.
Bookmark
END. Wow, that hit home.
John Kemeny was Einstein's personal assistant during his years at the Institute for Advanced Study.
BASIC was my first programming language. Taught myself in high school. I took several football board games, extracted out the plays and percentages, and merged them into a single game which I programmed in BASIC. Several of us used to play most every lunch hour, tweaking the game along the way based on our user experience.
First book I ever wrote was a Basic instruction manual. I was just starting my first master’s degree and was bored out of my gourd. Volunteered at their comp center and got assigned to a Basic project without knowing the language. Figured I wasn’t alone in being disgusted by the instruction manual they gave me, so I wrote one for the other people. I was later hired to write the reference manual for CS-4, a Navy standard language, in a language design company and that’s how I got into computer language design.
^z
10 print “RIP”
20 goto 10
Run
When I started programming, BASIC hadn’t yet been released, so I couldn’t write the traditional “Hello World” program.
Instead, the first full program I wrote was in assembly language for the IBM 704, a vacuum tube monster that put out as much heat as a small pizza oven. (And I wouldn’t be surprised if a modern pizza oven has more computing power than the 704.)
The program I wrote was one which used Chebyshev Polynomials (which I had recently learned about) to compute cosines. Harder to get working than “Hello World”, but much more like serious programming, since all I had to start with was the recurrence equations. I had to use an actual book, of course, since https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev_polynomials was far in the future.
P.S. Since the 704 was at the Argonne National Laboratory, and I was at the University of Chicago, each use involved a driving with a box of punch-cards. At least it much shorter than Kurtz’s trip.
I took a computer programming course (Math 105H) at U of Chicago in fall of ‘82 from Stuart Kurtz (he was younger). He is still there. The funny thing was that he taught PASCAL and had nothing good to say about BASIC. Worse, it was standard PASCAL, no built-in string handling.
I wonder if they are related?