BASIC computer language turns 40

The Salt Lake Tribune ^ | April 30, 2004 | J.M. Hirsch The Associated Press

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

On May 1, 1964, the BASIC computer programing language was born and for the first time computers were taken out of the lab and brought into the community.
    Forty years later pure BASIC -- Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code -- has all but disappeared, but its legacy lives on.
    "This is the birth of personal computing," said Arthur Luehrmann, a former Dartmouth physics professor who is writing a book about BASIC's development at the university. "It was personal computing before people knew what personal computing was."
    Paul Vick, a senior developer at Microsoft, said his company owes much to BASIC, the software giant's first product. Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office suite still use a descendent called Visual Basic.
    BASIC was born in an age when computers were large, expensive and the exclusive province of scientists, many of whom were forced to buy research time on the nation's handful of machines.
    Dartmouth math professors Thomas Kurtz and John Kemeny envisioned something better, an unprecedented system that would give their entire school -- from the faculty to the food service staff -- simultaneous access to a computer.
    Using existing technology called time sharing, the pair created a primitive network to allow multiple users to share a single computer through terminals scattered around campus.
    With the help of students, Kurtz and Kemeny developed a commonsense language to run the system, relying on basic equations and commands, such as PRINT, LIST and SAVE.

John McGeachie, then a student, was there at 4 a.m. on May 1, 1964, when BASIC came to life in the basement of Dartmouth's College Hall. Two terminals hooked up to a single computer ran two different programs.
    "I don't think anybody knew how it would end up catching on," said McGeachie, now 61 and a software designer. "It was just enormously exciting for us as students to be working on something so many people said couldn't be done."
    Within a short time nearly everyone at Dartmouth -- a humanities-based college -- had some BASIC experience. And it wasn't long before the business community took notice.
    Kurtz said that by 1970 nearly 100 companies used BASIC systems to share and sell time on computers. And when computers eventually entered the consumer market, most used BASIC.
    The popularity of BASIC waned as computers got more sophisticated, and newer languages were developed to take advantage of the power. Many of those languages, including the Internet's Java, have their roots in BASIC.

[Elsie]

I miss it BIG time!!

You could actually DO something differently that the canned programms that you have installed today.

I keep moving QBASIC onto newer and newer Windows machines, but someday it will just not work any more......

[Elsie]

Yeah, HP basic was GOOD as it had drawing routines that were easy to use. Also, being able to control your IEEE-488 test gear was nice too!!!

[festus]

Thats a good one. When we got the pet in elementary school they had this swell multiplication game.

The rockets fired across the screen and you'd have to type in the product before it hit the side. Miss to many and you blew up. Get enough right and you got to see a really cool ascii-art space ship fly across the screen. The extended ascii of the PET was very good at this ;-)

I never did learn my multiplication tables that well. Instead I read the source code, figured out where I had to start the program to skip the quiz and go straight to the winning picture.

To this day I'm still convinced thats the right choice. I can get paid more to program than do multiplication tables ;-)

[Allan]

I guess I should be ashamed to admit it
but I love BASIC.

Visual Basic still is the fastest way
to get a program running quickly
and there is a lot to be said for that.

[Elsie]

No one has mentioned the Amiga?

I've got one right here and it works just like new.... SLOW!!!!

But it TALKS if you do it right!

I've got a couple of C-64's sitting under my computer table as well as a VIC-20

---

How about the OSI's???

Ohio Scientific (something) Inc(?) I've one of themwith twin disk drives on it.

---

Does ANYONE know where I can get the instruction set for the little printer/plotter from Commodore? 1525 or 1526 IIRC

[jim_trent]

Yes, the memories.

I learned FORTRAN (which is basically BASIC) in the mid to late-1960's on an IBM 360. Later, on my first job, I did some programing with FORTRAN (mainly repetitive iteration calculations). The company did not even have a computer. We ran programs by phone on a timesharing arangement overnight. Got pages of printouts the next day.

Before long we got a Wang computer -- 8K of memory, no harddrive, and a screen that was about 8" or 9" diagonal. The programs were recorded on cassette tapes. Plain old cassettes. Then the speed of change increased. I ended up learning the variations of FORTRAN that included various BASIC, QUICKBASIC and others -- on smaller but ever more powerful computers. I skipped VISUALBASIC and went directly to webpage language.

The last programs I wrote with some form of BASIC were about 5 or 6 years ago. Structural analysis of hazardous material liquid trailers. It still works and they are using it daily.

[Elsie]

My firs t computer was a breadboard from Motorola. It was running a 6800 chipset, had an 8 digit hex display, a 20(?)Key input keyboard and stored programs on a common portable tape recorder running 300 baud!!!

It had a whopping 256 BYTES of RAM!!!

It had a 6820 I/O chip that wsmy link to the outside world. I wrote drivers for an ASCII keyboard as weel as a TV output board to get a crude dumbterminal simulator.

(When I found out that you did NOT need HARDWARE to get a AND or an OR function, I just went nuts!!

[Allan]

Makes me feel old having my first computer experience
writing programs in a BASIC predecessor, FORTRAN,
entering my programs and data on punch cards

OK everyone.
I wrote my first program on an LGP30
not on punched cards
but on punched tape
in machine language
in which numerical constants
had to be 'input' in binary.

Can anyone beat that?

[Nowhere Man]

I still have my first "laptop" sitting on my bookshelf. A Timex Sinclair 2068. Of course you needed a TV set for the monitor and a cassette player for memory. Still it was sort of portable.....

Heh, I remember my grade school buddy when we were in high school (1982-85), he sometimes brought his TRS-80 Color Computer (Co-Co) to school, a sort of portable computing pioneer. In his backpack he put the Co-co, a cassette recorder, and his portable 5 inch B&W TV and humped it around all day with him. It was a hoot. B-)

The first computer I really used was a TRS-80 Model I in 1979 when I was 13, it had 16K of RAM, Level II BASIC, and a 500 baud cassette drive. I have a TI-99/4A and an Apple //e which I still have to this day. We have come so far but yet there is a side of me that misses those days of computing, we felt we were pioneers. I remember back then, we wrote some of out own games, including one that simulated a nuclear attack on the US by the USSR where you are at NORAD. Wasn't very good looking back but it was fun.

It was a pain in the butt but yet very challenging and rewarding to convert "standard" (Microsoft) BASIC into TI BASIC which wasn't standard on the TI-99/4A and trying to get that to fit into 14.5K or 13.9k (Extended Basic, it was somewhat easier if you had that) but it was still cool nevertheless. It's a shame that TI was such tight about licensing of programs and equipment, the TI-99/4 or 99/4A series was ahead of it's time, 16-bit microprocessor in 1979. 16-bits in 1979! (although the TMS-9900 was designed in 1976) Whoa! Shame it died though, but it got my feet wet. I should dig out the old girl sometime and run the John Kerry program on it. B-)

[Nowhere Man]

That is cool! And what's even cooler is it's one of the few programming languages I actually know! I have some old D&D rpg games written in BASIC lying around here somewhere, was thinking of typing them in to play them a while back :)

You too, huh? I know I did the same thing, D&D programs and later Twilight: 2000 on the computer. I also remember typing a program from a 1985 Byte magazine that simulated a nuclear blast into my Apple //e and I used it to map various nuclear targets for my Twilight: 2000 and Gamma World RPG games I ran. Dang all this talk about early computers and my listneing to early 80's music, makes me want to dig them out right now, but I got to get work on my webpages or my clients will come hang me. B-)

[SauronOfMordor]

Ahh, yes, the good old days (NOT) when you were nearly finished sorting 20 or so trays of punch cards on an 082 and then dropped a tray.

At my old college we had a card reader that read the cards in, and ejected them out the side into a hopper. However, if you put a bend into the cards at about column 10, they would come flying out, miss the little metal tab that caught them and made them fall in the hopper, and continue flying to the side into the adjoining trash can

When I had to run a short "throwaway" job, it would amuse me to go up to the reader, insert my deck, turn and walk away as the cards flew into the trash, and do this when the next person in line was some grad student with a shoebox deck

[Lijahsbubbe]

I love your tagline! LOL!

[Fedora]

Oh, yeah, that brings back memories :) I think the first D&D programs I saw were in "Dragon" magazine--still have some copies of that and I'm hoping I still have the issues with the programs in it. I never played Gamma World but always wanted to, and recently a friend was getting rid of his old rulebook and gave it to me, so I've been on the lookout for old modules of that. I also have that D&D/GW crossover module, S3, "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks". On the computer side, talking about this is also reminding me of playing Moonlander, LOL!

[Nowhere Man]

Oh, yeah, that brings back memories :) I think the first D&D programs I saw were in "Dragon" magazine--still have some copies of that and I'm hoping I still have the issues with the programs in it. I never played Gamma World but always wanted to, and recently a friend was getting rid of his old rulebook and gave it to me, so I've been on the lookout for old modules of that. I also have that D&D/GW crossover module, S3, "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks". On the computer side, talking about this is also reminding me of playing Moonlander, LOL!

I liked to use the computer to come up with quick NPC's for my games although I still had to equip them, was going to write a part of the program for that but never got a "round tuit." I'd love to get a BASIC interpreter for the current PC's, I'm currently running a Morrow Project type RPG and I could use it to generate weather tables and so on. I do have a few od Dragon mags, espeically one that has good articles on a D&D/GW crossover and how to do it and how to put UFO's in your campaigns.

Other games I've dabbled in is Top Secret, Star Frontiers, and a little Car Wars.

[Mitchell]

I guess I should be ashamed to admit it but I love BASIC.

Visual Basic still is the fastest way to get a program running quickly and there is a lot to be said for that.

I haven't programmed in BASIC for years. Just thinking about it brings me back to high school. That was before microcomputers; we had a teletype with an acoustic modem that you'd place a telephone handset in, and we connected to a timesharing service that leased computer time. The speed was 110 bits per second, if I remember correctly -- not much faster than a fast typist. A lot of high schools had that kind of arrangement back then.

I probably still have the old paper tapes sitting around somewhere. You could read those paper tapes yourself if you had all the ASCII codes memorized :-).

[Fedora]

Using the computer to generate NPCs is handy! I never tried Morrow Project but I'm looking up a link on it now--sounds fun! What issue of Dragon has the article on the D&D/GW crossover? I have a bunch of issues from about the 70s-100s plus Best Of 2-4; used to have earlier ones back to the 40s, but I don't seem to have those anymore, though I keep feeling like I should have them around buried somewhere. I did a little Star Frontiers when it first came out but not much. I always thought Top Secret looked interesting. Other ones I've enjoyed are Marvel Superheroes and Call of Cthulhu. I also like wargames, though I've only scratched the surface of that with Axis and Allies, Panzer Blitz, basic stuff like that. On the video rpg side I really like Neverwinter Nights.

[Mitchell]

I wrote my first program on an LGP30 not on punched cards but on punched tape in machine language in which numerical constants had to be 'input' in binary.
Can anyone beat that?

Not me.

I wrote BASIC programs on punched paper tape, and FORTRAN and Algol programs on punch cards.

Some years later, I did quite a bit of 6502 machine-language programming in hexadecimal on an Apple II+. (Editing the numerical machine-language instructions got tiresome, primarily because inserting an instruction often required adjusting nearby relative branches, so I wrote an assembler in BASIC for the Apple. It was slow, but it worked. Later on I got the very nice LISA assembler for the Apple -- does anybody else remember that one?)

I still know a lot of the numerical opcodes for the 6502. I don't imagine I'll ever need that information again :-).

[supercat]

One thing I must admit surprises me in retrospect is how much better certain things like cassette tape data formats could have been engineered. It might be fun to try to see how much better I could do things today (for use with the old hardware), though I'm not sure what the point would be.

[mafree]

Boy does this thread bring back some memories. Happy Birthday BASIC!

[Ichneumon]

10 FOR X=1 to 1000000

That constant is likely to overflow the integer size on most BASIC interpreters. The most you could get away with would be 32767.