Have you ever programmed in BASIC?

[conmee]

I have great memories of learning TI-BASIC on my TI-99/4a. I wrote a simple Cold War era game that was based on War Games. Basically had to figure out the launch code to defend an impending Soviet attack. It was very simple and obviously not enough entertainment value to be printed in Byte or Compute magazine. But in my defense, I also used highly charged Cold War era epithets, "Better Dead than Red" and "Nuke the Commies!" with the Speech Synthesizer (think War Games but with Dr Strangelove vibes lol), which likely didn't help my efforts to get published.

After playing around with TI-BASIC (which used line numbers and wasn't very compatible with other variants), I moved on to TI's Editor/Assembler. The difference in speed was astounding to my teenage brain.

 

[BradleyinDC]

I took a BASIC class in high school in the 80s. I wrote a program to convert Fahrenheit to Celcius.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

My first computer interactions were teaching myself BASIC via Byte / Compute! /Antic magazines, then trying my luck on the TRS-80 Model III at the local Radio Shack on Saturday afternoons.

My parents got me a TI99-4/A which I eventually traded with a friend of mine for his Commodore 64.

 

[loopy123]

Back in the Apple II days I worked doing oceanographic data analysis at a university using FFT algorithms. We could submit jobs to a Cyber mainframe and wait 24 hours which sucked. So I wrote a BASIC FFT and ran it on the Apple II. Worked great!

 

[boppin]

The goal of BASIC wasn't efficiency, or applicability to all kinds of programming tasks, or theoretically beneficial features like structured programming. The goal was to be a simple language with which beginners could learn to program.

Basically, yes. But there are also genuine professional uses for BASIC. Some companies use VBA to facilitate communication between Excel and Access. Furthermore, the standalone version for Windows allows you to create fully functional EXE files that either run on their own or include the necessary DLLs. I even recall reading somewhere that you can create standalone applications—like "YourApp.app"—for macOS using RealBASIC.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

I wrote an Excel VBA application in 1997 that bumped me from temp to full time employee. It was used for over 10 years in 6 countries before being replaced by a commercial product.

 

[boppin]

I wrote an Excel VBA application in 1997 that bumped me from temp to full time employee. It was used for over 10 years in 6 countries before being replaced by a commercial product.

Can you tell me more about that? Most developments are usually done in-house anyway and cover a fairly niche area—like that project back in the day involving the analysis of job listings from daily newspapers, which was essentially a mix of Excel functions and VBA.

 

[PBG4 Dude]

Can you tell me more about that? Most developments are usually done in-house anyway and cover a fairly niche area—like that project back in the day involving the analysis of job listings from daily newspapers, which was essentially a mix of Excel functions and VBA.

Basically it was a time tracking system used for billing and expense reimbursement purposes. I built custom forms which the users interacted with.

Customers and all other important fields were selected from drop-down menus to eliminate free form data entry (other than hours, amounts and descriptions).

Invoice generation for billable work was a button-click at week’s end. Each invoice was saved as an Excel tab, ready to print and send.

There was a template that generated the program for new employees and updates.

 

[SteveSparks]

I love coding in BASIC. One of the first things I did when I get Claude Code was use it to write an experimental basic and assembly that I use to code in when I was a teen and in college. I had a Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer and other system. I also had one of those Radio Shack Microcomputer Trainers.

The project is here: https://pounceapps.com/retrocode

That is a screen shot from my app Retro Code that has BASIC and ASSEMBLY that runs in its own sandbox. This the the assembly language part of the project that is beasiicially a software representation of the Radio Shack Microcomputer Trainer.

You can learn more about the trainer her https://hackaday.com/2024/02/26/a-deep-dive-into-a-1980s-radio-shack-computer-trainer/

The IDEa bunch of code examples.

When I was working on this it brought back memories when I would sit up at Radio Shack and code on the TRS-80 or the Color Computer in the store. My Dad eventually got me my one Coco when I was in 8th Grade. So different than the collection of computers I have now! Our course I am old and gray and ..

Thanks for some fun memories!