The birth of BASIC.

[BrianHG]

Enjoy this piece of computing history...

[pcprogrammer]

Very interesting story. Being just a toddler in those years it passed by without notice. Always thought it was Gates who came up with it, but I guess it was him who brought it to the bigger public.

Dartmouth, not only BASIC but also the birth place of time sharing on a computer. Something I thought to be always there from the start on these big computing systems. Naive one could say, but it was not something addressed in history class 

But it does bring back memories of playing with some big Philips system in a schools computer club, with the teletypes rattling away. Noisy as hell, and now we prefer to have fan-less systems because fans are so loud 

My first BASIC experience was on a DAI (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DAI_Personal_Computer) at the same school, and next on a TRS-80 of my own.

[DiTBho]

Yeah, Basic, I started programming on a weird Japanese Sharp home computer with Microsoft Basic in its rom.
I was a kid and I was excited I could play with "(soft) floating point", it was a great feature in the late 80s.

Big irons had it in hardware for extra money
        (arch, math-chip)=
                 {
                    {x86, { i8087, i80287, i80387, ... }},
                    {68k, { 68681, 68682, ... }},
                    {mips, { R2010, R3010, ... }},
                    ..
                 }
while small home computers and little MPUs like 8051(1) ... usually didn't have it, so it was implemented in software, and Microsoft was one of the best company providing it.

((1) e.g. Intel chip 8051, sold by Intel with Microsoft Basic on Mask-ROM with floating point software features)

GW-Basic was ... simple, great, but kind of *spaghetti-code prone*. I remember my habit to buy monthly magazines, because at that time they included "lists of code", so my habit to grab lines here and there to make my own programs. Kind of Open Source ancestor? Dunno, but it was my personal GitHub.

Then I migrated from GW-Basic on a home computer to Quick-Basic on a personal computer (386), which was good because the "upgrade" added a real operating system (with floppies instead of tapes) and procedures instead of "spaghetti-code go-to and go-sub".

Next move, from Quick-Basic to Pascal, and then from Pascal to C89 ...

Holy Cow, it's been a far long journey 

[DiTBho]

If you buy a CASIO graphing calculator, even a modern one, you can still experience a GW-Basic-like experience with CASIO-basic 

[HighVoltage]

I started BASIC on a Sharp PC-1600
This one had a Sharp mini floppy drive and an A4 plotter

With this setup, one was the king in the university in the mid 80s.

The PC-1600 also had a real serial port and I could send programs to a real PC (286) and also use the RS232 to control instruments.

I still have the PC-1600 and a few smaller models.

[iMo]

I still have my PC-1251 in the drawer (~1983). Also a bigger sram chip I never soldered into it..

[pcprogrammer]

If you buy a CASIO graphing calculator, even a modern one, you can still experience a GW-Basic-like experience with CASIO-basic 

I had a Casio PB-100 for a while. Can't really remember if I got it before or after the DAI experience 

But my road in programming was BASIC, 8080 assembler, Z80 assembler, 6502 assembler, 8051 assembler, FORTH (8051), C/C++, ASP (HTML), basicscript, javascript, SQL, PHP, some python, verilog.

Now basically only use C and verilog, because I can get what I want to do done with just these.

 

[DiTBho]

I had a Casio PB-100 for a while. Can't really remember if I got it before or after the DAI experience 

I daily use my fx-9860GIII(1)(2018), but also an old fx-7500G (shell, 1989).
CASIO-Basic is great and well integrated on these calculators, and it's Ta simple, tokenized one, programming language.

"Tokenized" means that symbols and characters are used instead of words to symbolize commands. This minimizes the memory used in programs, used in every graphing calculators from Casio.

The commands featured are:
: This colon separates commands.
? Input Command. The calculator prompts for a value.
"prompt message"? Input Command with a prompt message.
◢ Output Command. The calculator stops and shows output. Continue the program by pressing EXE.
Goto n The Goto command, n is any number 0-9.
Lbl n The Label command, n is any number 0-9.
⇒ The Jump command. This is the basic If-Then-Else structure.
Isz and Dsz Increase and decrease a memory, by 1, respectively. This is akin to the For-Next loops.

Syntax:
test statement ⇒ do if test is true : skip to here if test is false
Isz var : do if var ≠ 0 : skip to here if var=0

... CASIO-Basic uses special symbols as keywords, you cannot map to ASCII chars (unicode, perhaps), so is there any Windows software that can convert a source file into a CASIO BASIC program and vice versa?

Sure! The FA123-FA124 kit! (serial cable + program)

(1) in the United States, the "fx-9860GIII" is named "fx-9750GIII", but it's the same unit.

[cfbsoftware]

I understand that BASIC can still used today for programming microcontrollers. A couple of systems I have heard of are BASICTools for ARM from Coridium:

https://www.coridium.us/coridium/shop/software/s01-basic

and as popularised in Practical Electronics and Silicon Chip magazines, MMBASIC on PIC32 microcontrollers :

https://micromite.org/micromites/

[themadhippy]

and as popularised in Practical Electronics and Silicon Chip magazines, MMBASIC on PIC32 microcontrollers :

Also ported to the pi pico https://geoffg.net/picomite.html

[rfclown]

Enjoy this piece of computing history...

I enjoyed that; thank you. Born in '61, my first program was in FORTRAN. Then BASIC on a TRS-80. Then hand assembling Z80 and poking it into memory via BASIC. Then tiny PASCAL. Then getting a proper Z80 assembler. (then college with a weird mix: JCL,PL1,COBOL,BASICs,8085/6800/68000 assembler...) Then QuickBASIC. Then QuickC. Then PIC and AVR assembler. Then gcc. Today it's either LabVIEW, gcc or scripting (sh or bat).

The video makes me want to get involved with a university where things are really happening. But I guess today connections and collaboration can happen virtually. Still... I have great memories of graduate research work at school.

[gbaddeley]

My first BASIC program was written on mark sense cards for a Data General Supernova in 1977. Switched to AppleSoft BASIC on Apple 2 in 1978. My first employer had Honeywell 6680 mainframes which ran GECOS 3, a direct descendant of one of the earliest Timesharing systems. It had a Dartmouth BASIC compiler. I was in a team that managed the OS so we had the compiler source code, maybe 50k lines of assembler. Fun days.

[floobydust]

I disliked the video, they call it a compiler but I know BASIC as being interpreted. The RS-232 terminals I'd guess are text input, but the initial punch cards I'm not clear what was on them or being run during a batch job.
When did it become interpreted?

I remember BASIC has run-time array bounds checking, unlike C. So sadly I find BASIC superior to C in that very critical aspect.
I did a PC app using VB because others told me you can run circles around the C++ coders, it would be much faster to code. Turned out to be true.
All you have to do is keep the OOP decomposition in your head and code in decent modules and the language is perfectly decent.
I did see computing scientists shittalk BASIC because it is missing academic structure, but that was never its premise.
I also remember it was expensive, a cash cow on cassette lol.

I blame Bill Gates for killing the language, GWBASIC it should have always been part of an OS. 40 years later, May 2020 Microsoft released the source code for GW-BASIC 1.0
Hurrah for nothing Microsoft and making Visual Studio a cloud-based turd. Just terrible.

[Phil_G]

Mine was Palo Alto Tiny BASIC on a kit-built Nascom-1 in 1978.  Two 2708 eproms. It was a while before I could afford enough memory to run BASIC, that needed not only a memory board but also a Nascom buffer board and backplane - all very expensive but I saved, built and learned a lot.  I'm retired now but I owe my career to that Nascom-1, which is probably whats driving my interest in retro-computing now! 

[BrianHG]

My first experience with BASIC was on an Atari 800 back in 1982.

Eventually within a year, I managed to customize the 4x joystick ports from inputs to outputs and use them to connect 2 different phone lines together in my house, both on different area codes, so that when one received a call, my software would open the second line and forward the phone call so that at the time, I could save long distance call costs within the city.

I also managed call messaging and a home made scanning attachment to my printer head using a photocell and light to scan pictures into the Atari 800 via the ADC built into each joystick input.  Though super slow, I did manage a 16 shade grey scans of photos which roasted the 2-bit 4 shade of grey from a B&W camera video captures at the time.

[IanB]

My first programming reference when I was learning about computers in the 70's was the original BASIC manual by Kemeny and Kurtz:

https://www.amazon.com/BASIC-Programming-John-G-Kemeny/dp/0471468304

That brings back some nostalgia.

[Phil_G]

Donald Alcock's "Illustrating BASIC" was a popular reference, all hand-written & spiral-bound, very easy to digest - it was serialised in one of the early magazines too.  I still have my original copy though its not been off its shelf in 40 years!

[BrianHG]

Donald Alcock's "Illustrating BASIC" was a popular reference, all hand-written & spiral-bound, very easy to digest - it was serialised in one of the early magazines too.  I still have my original copy though its not been off its shelf in 40 years!

HQ version:

[themadhippy]

from the above
"the last statement must be end,no other statement but the last may say end"

im sure  ive  seen plenty of basic programs were end was half way down the listing and the last statement was return

[IanB]

im sure  ive  seen plenty of basic programs were end was half way down the listing and the last statement was return

"Last" in space, or "last" in execution sequence? Nothing will execute past the end statement once it is reached.

[BrianHG]

I guess you can also use 'stop'.
Though, then entering 'continue' could create some weird problems depending on the program listing.

Also, in later years with some Basic compilers, the command 'stop' was not allowed.

[SL4P]

My first BASIC was on a PDP-11 on paper tape.
It grew over the years through MS-BASIC, CB/86, Windows, then Visual Basic and so on.

It was a fun ride with some COBOL, FORTRAN-77, and eventually settled with ac/C++

[IanB]

My first BASIC was on a PDP-11 on paper tape.

Ah, yes. I remember using (wasting?) a lot of paper tape to spell out messages using the pattern of holes as a dot matrix.

[Bud]

Sorry but I barely could watch only a bit of it, the video was so boring 

[SiliconWizard]

For the nostalgic, all this "LET" greatness has been revived in Rust. Nice stuff eh!