Have you ever programmed in BASIC?

[WriteNow]

A math teacher I know wrote a math practice program for his students, in BASIC. He had it running on an old PC in his classroom, and one student at a time could use it. I wrote an iPad app that did the same thing, customized to mimic what his program did. I thought that would make it available to more students. But then he retired before I could fine-tune the app just the way he wanted.

I'm reminded that some of my teachers actually did some programming of software they used for school. I recall one even apparently wrote his own grade book software so he could get something that met his needs exactly. Although I think he used Pascal, not BASIC. He definitely used an Apple II. (This was the 1980s, when the Apple II was a common school computer.)

A student wrote some software for one teacher, but it apparently never really worked the way the teacher wanted. Possibly bugs that hadn't been worked out. That teacher made some crack about the software being good for printing forms out that he could use to record data manually. Although I don't think he was particularly interested--that teacher wasn't really interested in using a computer.

 

[Nermal]

A part of me wishes I'd been a computer writer back in the 80s so I could have written a book titled Basically Basic BASIC: A Basic BASIC Guide.

Now if you'd called it a Book instead of a Guide then you'd have the BBBBBB.

 

[dmccloud]

A part of me wishes I'd been a computer writer back in the 80s so I could have written a book titled Basically Basic BASIC: A Basic BASIC Guide.

The preface would have either stated "This book was written in BASIC" or been an BASIC program itself, I assume?

 

[WriteNow]

The preface would have either stated "This book was written in BASIC" or been an BASIC program itself, I assume?

I think I like the idea of the BASIC program!

The mention of writing the book in BASIC reminds me of a story I heard in the 1980s about a writer. The author of a book on a word processor made it a condition with the publisher that he didn't have to actually use that word processor when writing the text of the book. He hated the program that much.

 

[Doctor Q]

The mention of writing the book in BASIC reminds me of a story I heard in the 1980s about a writer. The author of a book on a word processor made it a condition with the publisher that he didn't have to actually use that word processor when writing the text of the book. He hated the program that much.

I don't know if it's true, but I once read that documentation for FrameMaker was created in Microsoft Word and documentation for Microsoft Word was created in FrameMaker.

 

[Nermal]

I know that the BBC BASIC Reference Manual (which I posted above) was made in FrameMaker. I suspect that didn't apply to earlier printings through

 

[Boyd01]

This is how I loaded BASIC on my Apple ][ in 1978... it only took "about 1-1/2 minutes"!

 

[lloyddean]

And in late '79

 

[WriteNow]

it only took "about 1-1/2 minutes"!

I wonder about how much faster it was with floppy disk? (That was how Applesoft got loaded on the oldest computers in my high school computer programming class lab.) I do remember using floppy disks on newer Apple IIes with AppleWorks and how it took forever for any operation involving a floppy disk! My first Macintosh, a not that speedy SE, was amazing in comparison.

 

[Boyd01]

Yeah, the floppy drive was slow. But I got an AppleSoft card when it became available. It had BASIC burned into a set of ROM chips and when you flipped a switch, they took the place of the "upper" 16k of the 64k address space. IIRC. That meant the maximum RAM you could have was 48k, but BASIC was there when you powered up with no need to load anything.

 

[WriteNow]

Yeah, the floppy drive was slow. But I got an AppleSoft card when it became available. It had BASIC burned into a set of ROM chips and when you flipped a switch, they took the place of the "upper" 16k of the 64k address space. IIRC. That meant the maximum RAM you could have was 48k, but BASIC was there when you powered up with no need to load anything.

I remember most of the Apple computers in my high school had AppleSoft somehow in ROM. But we still had the hassle of starting up off a floppy in the BASIC classy. think it was needed so the disk drives would be usable (we'd save programs to disk), plus I recall there might have been something else (a programming tool of some sort?) they wanted loaded.

A couple of the oldest computers, though, didn't have AppleSoft in the machine. The teacher always kept a floppy disk with AppleSoft around that could be used if someone ended up using one of those computers.

 

[Boyd01]

I had the original Apple ][ and it only had integer BASIC in ROM. I believe the Apple II+ (which came along later) had floating point BASIC in ROM. Just came across a file folder with a lot of fun old Apple stuff. I got my Apple ][ in 1978, but by 1981, they had quite a line-up.

We got an Apple /// at work, along with the massive 5MB Profile Hard Disk! That was a very cool machine in its day.

 

[Isamilis]

I learned basic and understanding algorithms during my high school in 1987-1989. I used it for learning only until I use Pascal a lot in my college.

 

[Buadhai]

I learned Basic in 1980 when I bought an Atari 800 and a Basic cartridge. I also bought the 32K upgrade for the memory in the Atari for a mere $595. That is 32K.

I bought an Atari 800 about then. I remember using PEEK and POKE to write or copy machine language code into RAM which you could then save to a cassette tape. My greatest achievement was the image of a pipe with drops of water coming out. I'm sure I copied most of the code from a magazine.

 

[it wasnt me]

Have you used BASIC?

The first two "real" programming languages of my life - batch files don't count - were QBasic and Turbo Pascal when I was still at school. I gained my first experience in GUI development with Basic, or more precisely Microsoft Visual Basic, at the end of the 90s. However, the language got on my nerves for many reasons (for some of these reasons I don't like Python either). But I still use Pascal sometimes.

 

[jasnw]

I learned Basic on a PDP-10 while working at Kitt Peak National Observatory in 1968. It had just been delivered and was sitting around doing nothing in the lab next to mine awaiting a ride to the mountain, so I decided to take it for a spin (my other computer was a CDC-6400 Big Iron machine; FORTRAN II, baby!). The Basic interpreter was loaded from punch tape. Discovered the joys of both Basic and making art by printing characters out in the right spots on a TTY output. Fun times!

 

[ADGrant]

I learned to program in BBC basic on a BBC Model B while studying for O and A level Computer Science. Sadly my father bought a Commodore 64 so at home I would have to use the woefully inadequate Commodore Basic 2.0. That did encourage me to try assembler though.

 

[maflynn]

I started my programming journey with a TRS color computer - 4k model, then when the IBM PC came out a year later, I was up and running with that and programming in basic. I actually wrote a word processing program for the PC - clunky as hell but it was something I was proud of back then

Fast forward to when visual basic was a thing, I wrote a double entry fund accounting package in excel and VBA, journals, ledgers, full GAAP financial statements.

Its funny, I had a facebook group recommendation for legacy basic, and that started bringing back all sorts of memories.

 

[Doctor Q]

I started my programming journey with a TRS color computer - 4k model, then when the IBM PC came out a year later, I was up and running with that and programming in basic. I actually wrote a word processing program for the PC - clunky as hell but it was something I was proud of back then

Fast forward to when visual basic was a thing, I wrote a double entry fund accounting package in excel and VBA, journals, ledgers, full GAAP financial statements.

Its funny, I had a facebook group recommendation for legacy basic, and that started bringing back all sorts of memories.

Ah, the good old Tandy computer line. RadioShack called it the "TRS-80 Color Computer" at first, even though it was nothing like the original TRS-80.

One BASIC program I wrote, when I was first learning programming, computed the estimated number of baseball cards that you'd need to buy if each purchase was a random card in a sealed package, given N, the total number of different cards available. The output showed me that it would likely cost a lot more than I had expected to collect a set of N baseball cards that way, unless you were extremely lucky and the cards really were distributed fairly.

I wrote accounting software years later, but not in BASIC. By then, I'd migrated to higher-level programming languages.

 

[adrianlondon]

One BASIC program I wrote, when I was first learning programming, computed the estimated number of baseball cards that you'd need to buy if each purchase was a random card in a sealed package, given N, the total number of different cards available. The output showed me that it would likely cost a lot more than I had expected to collect a set of N baseball cards that way, unless you were extremely lucky and the cards really were distributed fairly.

That's why we had swapsies! In the UK we collected football cards.

 

[martint235]

All through school and then university I was taught that BASIC was a great introductory language but that no one used it out in the real world. For my degree I learnt Fortran, COBOL and Pascal. My first job was as a tape monkey but imagine my surprise when I found out that the developers wrote in BASIC.

Since first coming across a computer at 12, I wanted nothing more than to be a developer and when I got my chance it was writing front ends in Visual Basic for Oracle databases. However reality was more boring than I’d thought, working on huge programs for months at a time wasn’t my idea of fun. I’ve stayed in IT but moved disciplines regularly and now lead a team of project managers on massive biometric databases.

 

[ab22]

45 years ago I worked for a company who made platinum resistance thermometers, including $$ laboratory standards that were supplied with a table of resistance & temperature that we used to pay a fortune to have calculated & printed over an audio modem connection to some computer miles away & delivered by post.

With no experience, I put the relevant equations into a Basic program, which worked but ran near-unusably slowly on a 6502 Commodore used in the R&D lab.

Hmm, the company had a mainframe used for sales & payroll, & curiously, allowed a 16 year old to access it… that was much faster, but resulted in calls from payroll to computing to me - pack it in, we can't process wages while that's running, and sales are complaining too.

a 6809 development machine https://www.retrotechnology.com/restore/exorset.html used for creating new controller boxes proved faster than the mainframe anyway, and with some creative time-sharing, saved a lot of money compared with the previous remote solution.

 

[Chirsroot]

That’s an awesome history and tribute to BASIC! I haven't used BASIC the way you have, but I’ve definitely "read" and "learned" a lot about its evolution—from early Dartmouth BASIC to later versions like Visual Basic and even quirky ones like QB64 and FreeBASIC. It’s fascinating how such a simple, beginner-friendly language laid the groundwork for so many programmers (and still has a fanbase today). Sounds like you've had quite the journey through its many flavors!

 

[edubfromktown]

I started coding 1st on an Apple ][ in assembler and BASIC at school (and on my C=64 at home).

In the mid-1980's I developed a radio antenna design program in complied/runtime BASIC for a local engineering firm.

I happened to be taking calculus in college at the time with one of the firm's employees. After describing what the firm did and some of the challenges, I realized that cubic splines would be a perfect real-world solution to reduce a few design steps. (We now call this automation haha).

The result was a reasonably sophisticated piece-wise polynomial interpolation (with 2nd derivative "smoothing") IBM XT application.

It shocked the old guys walking around with slide rules who were constantly calculating these and other sorts of things.

They thought that I came from a different planet, for real!

 

[Chirsroot]

Absolutely! BASIC was one of the first languages I learned, and it really laid the foundation for how I understood programming logic. I started with GW-BASIC and later dabbled in QBasic and Visual Basic during school projects. It’s amazing how approachable and forgiving BASIC was, especially for beginners the instant feedback and line-by-line execution made it feel more like a conversation with the computer. Even though I’ve moved on to other languages, I still appreciate how influential BASIC has been in shaping programming education and accessibility.

R.I.P Thomas Kurtz

From the Your favorite programming language thread:

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John Kemeny died in 1992 and Thomas Kurtz died last week (November 12, 2024). They were the co-inventors of BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) at Dartmouth College in 1963, as well as creating the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System.

BASIC has had countless implementations, variations, and extensions over the years, including Microsoft's Visual Basic. The list of BASIC dialects has well over 350 entries! Over the years I've written software in a number of them.

Apple's products have supported Apple BASIC (aka Integer BASIC), Apple Business BASIC, Applesoft BASIC, Chipmunk Basic, GLBasic, MacBASIC, PureBasic, TML BASIC, ZBasic, and probably others.

Have you used BASIC?