[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Memories !!

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

IBM's 'dinosaur' turns 40

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Moose4]

10 PRINT "JOHN F. KERRY IS NOT FIT TO BE PRESIDENT"
20 GOTO 10

}:-)4

[martin_fierro]

Hee hee!

[pt17]

Memories !!

How true. In another life, back in the late 60s, I taught math. There was a local GE plant that let us hook into the GE/Dartmouth time-sharing network with ASR 35s, shown below, where my students did a lot of BASIC programming.

[Bear_in_RoseBear]

ping, for the memories...

[saquin]

Ah, the memories. I remember writing programs in BASIC on my old Commodore Vic 20 (hooked up to a 12-inch black and white TV, and a tape recorder to save programs).

[JenB]

This is cool! I share a birthday with a really ancient programming language!

[Ronly Bonly Jones]

Paul Vick, a senior developer at Microsoft, said his company owes much to BASIC>>>

Yes, starting with most Windows source code.

[jimfree]

Great memories, in fact. Prior to there being significant inexpensive software to license for a home computer I wrote a check book balancing program in BASICA. My wife played with it a bit and that helped her later as she wrote SAS programs in grad school. I never had to use it on the job though. Maybe that's why my memories are fond.

[Willie Green]

Memories !!

Gee, I didn't realize that BASIC was THAT old.
My introduction to programming languages began in '71 with keypunching FORTRAN IV (w/ WATFOR AND WATFIV), COBOL and IBM 370 Assembly Language. I didn't stumble across BASIC until '75 or '76, and remember thinking it was nothing but an anemic (albeit easier), watered down version of FORTRAN.

[kdot]

I'm afraid we dinosaurs will be extincted soon. Kids today don't know or appreciate real programming. Interview one and ask: "What programming languages do you know?" If you get the answer "All of them", you've found your candidate. Programming is an art. Just because someone takes a VB class in school and can operate any one of our great point and click 4GL development environments (Visual C++, Delphi, etc.) doesn't make him a programmer. Let's talk technical. (from an old Digital perspective).

• Can you write a Macro program and access a few run time library routines for me?
• Whats the difference between QIO and QIOW?
• What is a context switch?
• What does CMKRNL do?
• What is a distributed lock manager?
• How do you maintain a process context when a node in a cluster fails?
• Do you know the difference between parallel and vector processing?
• What parameters would you adjust if you witnessed process swapping (keep it clean!)
• And the finali - how many more years until YOU retire?

I don't have anyone to talk dirty with anymore. boo hoo.

[The Great RJ]

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

[supercat]

The original version of BASIC may have been designed 40 years ago, but how many people (even among those who program some variant of BASIC) know Dartmouth BASIC?

When did the first variants appear that regarded strings as a natural type (rather than an array) and allowed for multiple statements on a line (including following an IF/THEN)?

On a related note, did Darmouth basic start out supporting the "MAT" keyword, or was that a later enhancement?

[roadcat]

Memories !!

I was a late-comer. Didn't start using BASIC until 1970 on a college computer. A couple years later I really appreciated the simplicity of BASIC when I started doing Octal machine language programming on a PDP-8. One thing that sucked was saving your code on paper tape rolls and tieing it with a rubber band. Still got a few rolls laying around here. Then when I got my Apple-II in '77 I was amazed at the expanded repertoir of BASIC commands over that of the college system that cost 100 times as much.

[July 4th]

No way I thought it was that old. I remember learning it on Apple II-somethings as a 3rd grader back in the mid-80's.

[Jalapeno]

ping for the old guys

[Publius6961]

Am I the only one who misses BASIC?

I wrote very useful and much used programs in the 70s and early 80s to solve engineering, surveying and astronomic reduction programs that I could still use today if there was a modern version of the language.
The only thing I can find that comes close to the Cadillac of BASIC languages, HP BASIC, is Liberty Basic, which has been "fancied up" almost to uselessness for all but hard core programmers.

The beauty of BASIC was that literally anyone with a semi-competent mastery of math could write a program to do pretty much anything.
With the advance into 32-bit programming and with the gross advance in computer speeds, a modern BASIC would be a killer application.

Where is the modern Bill Gates?

[Jalapeno]

Ah, the Radio Shack TRS-80 (aka "Trash-80").

Here's an interesting site:

http://oldcomputers.net

[larryjohnson]

Learned Fortran in 62.After then I hire computer experts.