The BASIC Programming Language Turns 60
505 sats \ 11 comments \ @0xbitcoiner 2 May devs
This article brought back a flood of memories for me. I learned to program in BASIC back in the day, and those were the good old days.
Easy-to-use language that drove Apple, TRS-80, IBM, and Commodore PCs debuted in 1964.
Sixty years ago, on May 1, 1964, at 4 am in the morning, a quiet revolution in computing began at Dartmouth College. That's when mathematicians John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz successfully ran the first program written in their newly developed BASIC (Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) programming language on the college's General Electric GE-225 mainframe.
Little did they know that their creation would go on to democratize computing and inspire generations of programmers over the next six decades.
  • What is BASIC?
  • The journey to BASIC
  • BASIC goes PC
  • BASIC today

... read more at arstechnica.com
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146 sats \ 5 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 2 May
Man, I spent so many hours as a kid learning BASIC by typing in programs from magazines. Such good times.
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53 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler 2 May
Same here. On a ZX Spectrum. Around the age of 10. It was the first programming language I learned.
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30 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 2 May
I wanted ZX Spectrum clone (they were popular here) when I was even younger, but we didn't have money for computer. When I was 10, in 1994, mother bought used IBM PC/AT clone for her work (AMD Am286 14 MHz CPU, 1 MB RAM, 40 MB ST506 MFM HDD, EGA 16 colour video [max resolution 640x350]). That was my first actual experience with computer at home and I started learning to code some two weeks later.
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41 sats \ 0 replies \ @erict875 2 May
Same. 😇
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41 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner OP 2 May
I didn't get started that early, but I do remember a magazine, I think it was called Compute, that had code to experiment with. Good times, haha!
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16 sats \ 0 replies \ @StillStackinAfterAllTheseYears 2 May
Oh yeah, I subscribed to Compute (or COMPUTE! as Wikipedia notes) and still remember it fondly.
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115 sats \ 2 replies \ @kristapsk 2 May
That's how I started learning to code 30 years ago. MS-DOS had QBasic interpreter built-in. And I had a book in Latvian about different dialect of BASIC from old Soviet mainframe computers.
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31 sats \ 1 reply \ @0xbitcoiner OP 2 May
That's incredible! You're holding a piece of history in your hands.
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20 sats \ 0 replies \ @kristapsk 2 May
It's legendary book, still have physical copy of it. https://laacz.lv/f/txt/ka-pecis-beiskans-maiju-sapratinu-programmet-macija/
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89 sats \ 0 replies \ @0fje0 2 May
A great read, thanks. A commentor below that article wrote:
The most influential thing I ever read was from the Applesoft Tutorial:
"There is nothing you can do by typing at the keyboard that can do any damage to the computer. Unless you type with a hammer. So feel free to experiment. With your fingers."
That brought back some fond memories!
A friend of mine ordered an Apple IIe and had it delivered to me, because he didn't have a fixed address at the time. When it arrived, I phoned him with the news and he asked me to unbox it and "see if it works".
After switching it on, I had no idea how to determine if it worked, so I just literally started to hit every key on the keyboard starting from the top left corner and working my way - very methodically one by one, mind you - down the whole keyboard and watched as the characters appeared on the screen.
Hmmm... So it "works"? I mean, the characters do show up, right?
It wasn't until I came to hit the <Enter> key that the screen suddenly did something: It said "Syntax error." Great, I guess it works!
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16 sats \ 0 replies \ @nullama 2 May
READY
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