Thread: Anyone else learn old BASIC

I think it's probably safe to assume that a good chunk of the programmers initiating between the 70s and late 80s have started with BASIC. It was a very popular programming language then, was free and outperformed ALGOL, Fortran and COBOL.

I learned BASIC in 6th grade ('87-'88) on an Apple. Oh, memories of spaghetti and goto and A$ and B$ *twitch*. I wrote a quiz program that my teacher used as a test. It was a whole mess of

Code:

100 print "Question 1: What is blah?"
110 input A$
120 if A$="Correct Answer" then goto 150
130 print "No, the correct answer is blah"
140 goto 200
150 print "Correct!"
160 c = c + 1
200 print "Question 2: What is blah?"
210 input A$
...

for like 20 questions with a print "You got" + c + "answers right out of 20." at the end.
My dad got a Timex Sinclair at a garage sale shortly after that and I mucked around with Basic a whole bunch more. I never did get the hang of the Peeks and Pokes (though I am sure I would understand them much better now if I looked back into it) but I helped teach basic in 7th and 8th grade.

Then came my Tandy RL 1000 and more mucking around with Basic until in 9th grade I started learning Pascal. Basic never seemed to be as useful after that. And then C in 12th grade when I tried to disect a WWIV BBS and modify it for our school BBS.

Yep! On the ZX Spectrum +3 first, then once I got my first PC (at 11 in 1991 - an Amstrad PC1512 with optional 20mb HDD) I moved onto GWBASIC. That lasted for a few years until I got persuaded to learn C by my dad at about 14. I hated it at first and gradually lost interest.

Later I moved onto Qbasic (still using line numbers) before finally being brough round to C at around 17 when I was beginning to see the limits of Basic.

One of my first C projects was a 'humorous' random sentence generator (a project I'd been cultivating since the GWBASIC days).

Originally Posted by samGwilliam

then once I got my first PC (at 11 in 1991 - an Amstrad PC1512 with optional 20mb HDD)

Wasn't it a sweet?
My first PC too. And I even got the same optional hard drive that would stick to one of the floppy slots, leaving you with "just" one floppy drive. Oh man, I so much miss those days... It came with MSDOS and Gem.

Your memory works better than mine. When you mentioned the disks, mine immediately clicked. I didn't try Gem much. I got too hooked on Pascal and especially DBase and thought GUIs would never kick off, hehe. The other DOS was DRDOS that only with the later versions would gain some interest from us.

My games were... hmm... can't remember actually. But all those you mentioned, I played. I also remember Prince of Persia later on and of course, heaps of text adventure games which I was quiet found at the time... plus Pools of Darkness and Curse of the Azure Bonds. The two games that spurred my interest in Pascal after I've read on PCPlus (then quiet sold out to the Amstrad) had been developed in pascal.

I don't seem to recall anything particular about the hard disk.

If this is a pacman clone, there is no way of telling. There were so many, some unauthorized, that would spread through BBS', and some would even end in magazines companion floppies at the time. Pokeman is a far shot, but pucman was used at least once, I seem to recall.

Took a look at the author (Jimenez, right?) and the software. I played this too. However can't remember the name. But it's quiet possible that you played a different named version. It was quiet usual for some game being freely distributed to end up being altered by someone else. And sometimes the authors would do it themselves, this way ensuring a wider distribution through BBS. Changing the name of a game and some of its features, especially a clone, and most particularly a unauthorized clone was a normal day in a hackers life.