BASIC Programming language is 50 years old today

[jmpokc1957]

It is being reported that the BASIC programming language made it's debut fifty years ago today at Dartmouth College. I first used BASIC sometime in the early 70's when a time sharing terminal became available at Putnam City High School. I've posted about that previously. I remember that my father, who was an engineer at General Electric/Honeywell at the time, brought home a BASIC manual for me to use. As I remember it was pretty plain by today's standards, but it got the job done.

I think my first program was a crude artillery game where a target was placed at a random distance and you had to

010 INPUT "ENTER ELEVATION ANGLE", A

Something like that. It got me started. I've been a software engineer for over 30 years now, and, seeing how things have developed, I wished I'd been a farmer!

[Of Sound Mind]

01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101100 00100000 01000010 01000001 01010011 01001001 01000011 00100001

[Just the facts]

01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101100 00100000 01000010 01000001 01010011 01001001 01000011 00100001

10 CLS
20 PRINT "That is not basic."
30 PRINT "That is binary, and it has been around since the beginning of time."
40 CLS
50 PRINT "Unless you wrote something clever about basic in binary,"
60 PRINT "in which case I now look stupid."
70 END

On a side note, if you have young ones you want to teach programming to check out SMALLBASIC. It is free.

http://smallbasic.com/

[Of Sound Mind]

10 cls
20 PRINT "That is not basic."
30 PRINT "That is binary, and it has been around since the beginning of time."
40 END

10 cls
20 PRINT "I didn't claim it was BASIC"
30 PRINT "BASIC ultimately communicates in binary."
40 PRINT "I was offering birthday wishes from one computer language to another."
50 PRINT "Sorry it didn't compute."
60 PRINT "P.S. 'Beginning of time'?"
70 END

[Snowman]

10 cls
20 PRINT "I didn't claim it was BASIC"
30 PRINT "BASIC ultimately communicates in binary."
40 PRINT "I was offering birthday wishes from one computer language to another."
50 PRINT "Sorry it didn't compute."
60 PRINT "P.S. 'Beginning of time'?"
70 END

So for reference the beginning of time is 1679 now.

[SoonerDave]

So for reference the beginning of time is 1679 now.

Any programmer worth their non-cryptographic salt (you either get that reference or you don't) knows that time began 1 Jan 1970.

[SoonerDave]

01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101100 00100000 01000010 01000001 01010011 01001001 01000011 00100001

40 print "i was offering birthday wishes from one computer language to another."

10 cls
20 print "omigosh, he wasn't kidding"
30 print "holy ascii, batman!"

[Mel]

01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101100 00100000 01000010 01000001 01010011 01001001 01000011 00100001

dang it, you beat me to it.

[ctchandler]

OSM,
I've been patiently waiting for one of the group to post this oldie but goodie - "There are 10 kinds of people, those that understand binary and those that don't.".
C. T.
p.s. I'm a little disappointed with you folks! Or maybe ashamed? Possibly even jealous because you are all probably a lot younger than me and that quote is old.

01001000 01100001 01110000 01110000 01111001 00100000 01100010 01101001 01110010 01110100 01101000 01100100 01100001 01111001 00101100 00100000 01000010 01000001 01010011 01001001 01000011 00100001

[Just the facts]

Counting has always existed. In fact, the very first thing created was the binary option of dark and light. The next counting method was base 7 - which we still use today.

[Pete]

Took Basic programming at OU in 1980 and ran the programs on punch cards.

Crazy to think how much things have changed in such a short period of time.

[Mel]

Q-bit is a fun page to play around with this stuff.

[Urbanized]

Took Basic programming at OU in 1980 and ran the programs on punch cards.

Crazy to think how much things have changed in such a short period of time.

It's not as short of a period of time as you and I both wish it was.

[RadicalModerate]

I've mentioned this before, but back when I was a Junior in High School (1969), taking Algebra II, we had a terminal connected to the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad mainframe. It ran on punchtape. Actually, it ran on electricity, but data was input with punchtape. Part of our math education included writing flowcharts and programs--in BASIC--to solve Algebra problems that I didn't have the foggiest clue how to solve with pencil and paper. I've always been more of a "Social Studies/History/English" or "Arts and Parties" kind of guy. (To this very day, when I see the phrase "graphing functions" or "the wrapping function" I cringe inside. But I was fairly good at Geometry.) The whole experience was so bad that I shunned computers completely until about 1993. Happy Birthday, BASIC.

[jmpokc1957]

I've mentioned this before, but back when I was a Junior in High School (1969), taking Algebra II, we had a terminal connected to the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad mainframe. It ran on punchtape. Actually, it ran on electricity, but data was input with punchtape. Part of our math education included writing flowcharts and programs--in BASIC--to solve Algebra problems that I didn't have the foggiest clue how to solve with pencil and paper. I've always been more of a "Social Studies/History/English" or "Arts and Parties" kind of guy. (To this very day, when I see the phrase "graphing functions" or "the wrapping function" I cringe inside. But I was fairly good at Geometry.) The whole experience was so bad that I shunned computers completely until about 1993. Happy Birthday, BASIC.

Writing flowcharts! I'm sure many of you will recognize the picture of a genuine, vintage, ca. 1970's IBM Flowcharting Template! If you don't recognize it then don't worry, you haven't missed a thing!

[ljbab728]

Writing flowcharts! I'm sure many of you will recognize the picture of a genuine, vintage, ca. 1970's IBM Flowcharting Template! If you don't recognize it then don't worry, you haven't missed a thing!

I certainly recognize that. I have one in my briefcase right now.

[SoonerDave]

I certainly recognize that. I have one in my briefcase right now.

One thing I think we are seriously lacking in today's environment is a really good system for documenting the design and operation of software systems. It's virtually all tribal knowledge. And when you talk about putting designs to paper in some form (written, graphical, whatever), people roll their eyes in disgust, but they get even more disgusted when the One Critical Guy leaves and no one left behind knows how things operate...really a serious issue to me, I think, going forward. You'd be amazed the number of fairly important software houses that "seem" like big companies but are really just a few guys doing all the tech stuff. Lots of fragility in there, in my book. And that's where the loss of "system smarts" really hurts.

[jmpokc1957]

One thing I think we are seriously lacking in today's environment is a really good system for documenting the design and operation of software systems. It's virtually all tribal knowledge. And when you talk about putting designs to paper in some form (written, graphical, whatever), people roll their eyes in disgust, but they get even more disgusted when the One Critical Guy leaves and no one left behind knows how things operate...really a serious issue to me, I think, going forward. You'd be amazed the number of fairly important software houses that "seem" like big companies but are really just a few guys doing all the tech stuff. Lots of fragility in there, in my book. And that's where the loss of "system smarts" really hurts.

You are exactly right! You must of worked at the places that I have over the years.

What people( ie management, typically ) don't realize is the complexity of the stuff. Most of the programs in the industry I work in( industrial automation ) tend to be in the small to medium size, say 50,000 to 100,000 lines of code. Most are written by one to three people. There is no way anyone can really keep up with that and keep the bugs out. Pity the poor guy( and I've been him ) who has to come into a company and maintain and modify a 100,000 line program that he has never seen before! And that is just the code we have access to! What about the run-time libraries, third party, etc..

One of the arguments against President Reagan's "Strategic Defense Initiative", better known as "Star Wars" was that the complexity of the software to control such a system. It would be impossible to know, much less control, all the possible states which could occur.

We are surround by so much complex technology that we don't think of the complexity of it. It just seems to work( most of the time ). And, as you pointed out, it seems to be done by just a handful of people.

For what it's worth, my rant of the day!

[ctchandler]

Jmpokc1957,
I recently threw away a template from 1962. It was yellow, not green and included things like a (punch) card, a card file, and of course the diamond for decisions and other items. It was used by the predecessors of systems analysts, called "project planners". It was also for the old electronic accounting machines (EAM). The templates were hard to come by, you had to be fairly senior and experienced to get one.
C. T.

Writing flowcharts! I'm sure many of you will recognize the picture of a genuine, vintage, ca. 1970's IBM Flowcharting Template! If you don't recognize it then don't worry, you haven't missed a thing!

[Urbanized]

[Just the facts]

That Y2K non-event was probably the result of all the money spent trying to prevent it. I worked for a small city at the time and I remember running tests for the water department to make sure the water bills printed with two zero's. On the first run of the new year they realized the paper was pre-printed with a 19__ so the bills printed as 1900 anyhow.

[SoonerDave]

That Y2K non-event was probably the result of all the money spent trying to prevent it. I worked for a small city at the time and I remember running tests for the water department to make sure the water bills printed with two zero's. On the first run of the new year they realized the paper was pre-printed with a 19__ so the bills printed as 1900 anyhow.

I'd qualify that with a 60/40 disagree over agree. Was there a real issue? Of course. And, yes, the attention drawn to the problem got some of those issues fixed. But was the problem ever the "society will implode at midnight" doomsday stockpile food-and-ammo survivalist orgy some had predicted? Absolutely not.

I just know that by the time this "crisis" hit, and all the hypemongers had had their day, there'd be a lot of cheap generators available come Jan 2000....

[RadicalModerate]

I just know that by the time this "crisis" hit, and all the hypemongers had had their day, there'd be a lot of cheap generators available come Jan 2000....

From a strictly personal, sociological/geometric standpoint, that seems like a fairly selfish, free-market attitude. =)
Hopefully, you would have given all those generators acquired through BASIC insider trading to the poor.
Then taken a tax write-off for a donation to charity. (even it the poor couldn't afford gasoline to run the generators).
At the same time as The Environment couldn't afford bigger carbon footprints.

[Just the facts]

I'd qualify that with a 60/40 disagree over agree. Was there a real issue? Of course. And, yes, the attention drawn to the problem got some of those issues fixed. But was the problem ever the "society will implode at midnight" doomsday stockpile food-and-ammo survivalist orgy some had predicted? Absolutely not.

I just know that by the time this "crisis" hit, and all the hypemongers had had their day, there'd be a lot of cheap generators available come Jan 2000....

I agree that the fear-mongering was way over the top. Some people thought the laws of physics would cease to exist and gravity would be shut-off. I was new to IT at that time and I asked my boss if we need to be on-site on Dec 31. He said if you a see a mushroom cloud over Australia go ahead and come in, we will have about 19 hours to fix whatever the problem is.

[Brett]

I took BASIC programming in high school. I still remember that it was referred to as "GOTOless programming". Loved creating infinite loops with the GOTO command. The amusement lasted all of three seconds. My teacher was an absolute dolt and didn't realize that I lifted the teacher's edition of the textbook from his bookcase. Its pretty easy to program BASIC when you have all of the answers.