BASIC Turns 50

vttom

Senior Member
I just read about this on Slashdot. I thought the PICAXE forum might like to know about it...

http://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/events.html

And if we're going to reminisce about BASIC, my first exposure to BASIC was with the TRS-80 color computer (aka the CoCo). I later moved on to BASIC on the Commodore 64, BASIC on the IBM PC XT, QBASIC, VisualBasic, VBScript, LotusScript (a dialect of VisualBasic/VBScript), FreeBASIC, and finally PICAXE BASIC.

I probably missed one or 2 along the way, but that pretty much sums it up.

:)
 

geoff07

Senior Member
Fortunately, Picaxe Basic is very unlike the original Basic, which would be little use today. The best one I used was BBC Basic, which even had floating point (Rev-Ed please note) in a 2MHz system
 

westaust55

Moderator
I met Dr Wang when I worked for Exatron he wrote the best Tiny BASIC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li-Chen_Wang :cool:
Around 1977/78 I was also using a 4K byte integer only "tiny BASIC" with a Motorola 6800 home designed and built "computer".
With a hacked display board as intended for a TV for store advertising and building a Honeywell ASCII keyboard kit it was somewhat like a real computer rather than many which had hex Keypad and hex displays.
Around 1978 I bought my first commercial home computer an OSI Challenger C2-4P which had floating point maths and 16 Colours! with a 64 x 32 display (BASIC program lines up to 72 chars from memory).

Prior to that used BASIC from 1972 on a PDP11 (refrigerator sized) computer.

Copies of the 1964 Dartmouth BASIC manual can still be found on the internet for those interested in the evolution and changes that have occurred.
 
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My first experience using Basic was in 1968. The program run on an IBM 360. Performing stress analysis of precast concrete structural elements. The data was submitted by punching a teletype tape that was transmitted at the blinding speed of 10 characters per second. The results were transmitted back at the same speed. If we were not pressed time wise we performed the calculations manually with our slide rules. Because online processing was very expensive.

Andrés (a very old man)
Instead of Senior member I should be titled Ancient Member on the road to senility
 

premelec

Senior Member
Sinclair built from kit with 1K memory and on to the Commodore VIC-20 with 3.5K and lots of different BASICs on PC - some compiled to pretty fast exe...

@Marmitas what about stacks of Hollerith cards handed back to you the next day with error in first few noted :) I have a collection of slide rules - great for reasonable precision and various specialties - and there's a Javarule on the Internet with very good precision compared to trad slipsticks... on the other hand I tend to write up spreadsheets [not VisiCalc... - Excel 4] to do complex calcs as the TI-59 batteries died... such fun all...
 

Armp

Senior Member
And if we're going to reminisce about BASIC, my first exposure to BASIC was with the TRS-80 color computer (aka the CoCo).
I still have my hand wired, homebrew Coco clone. Made out of Motorola freebies, and 'IBM Quailty Assurance' rejected RAM chips.
Anyone have a Coco emulator that will run on a Pi :) ?
 

Armp

Senior Member
Andrés (a very old man)
Instead of Senior member I should be titled Ancient Member on the road to senility
I'm already there.... Punched tape for Ferranti Pegasus, affectionately known as Peggy, in 1963!
Is anyone older?

The Really Old Fart
 

Pongo

Senior Member
@Marmitas what about stacks of Hollerith cards handed back to you the next day with error in first few noted :)
Hand punching Fortran on Hollerith cards, that was a good way to go crazy. Got a big stack of dirty creased ones back one day, the note said "sorry, we dropped the box, please re-sort".
 

papaof2

Senior Member
Hand punching Fortran on Hollerith cards, that was a good way to go crazy. Got a big stack of dirty creased ones back one day, the note said "sorry, we dropped the box, please re-sort".
That was the reason for using a red pencil or other obvious marking medium to make one or more diagonal lines across the top of the deck so they could easily be re-assembled in the correct order.
 

Pongo

Senior Member
That was the reason for using a red pencil or other obvious marking medium to make one or more diagonal lines across the top of the deck so they could easily be re-assembled in the correct order.
Right! But the operators wouldn't deign do that, and they left out the "and ran them over with a truck" part lol.
 

hippy

Technical Support
Staff member
Hand punching Fortran on Hollerith cards, that was a good way to go crazy. Got a big stack of dirty creased ones back one day, the note said "sorry, we dropped the box, please re-sort".
That was the reason for using a red pencil or other obvious marking medium to make one or more diagonal lines across the top of the deck so they could easily be re-assembled in the correct order.
Right! But the operators wouldn't deign do that, and they left out the "and ran them over with a truck" part lol.
There were many 'life lessons' to be had in the days of hollerith cards. The primary one being that it pays to be nice to people and pays not upset anyone. And the corollary that you rarely know who you could be upsetting or alienating and there may come a time when you need their help.
 

Dippy

Moderator
That means that all the old regulars here are older than BASIC and some are even older than FORTAN.
Are any older than Babbage?

And many here are younger than a PIC... makes me feel old.

Ah well, back to your reminiscing...
 

AllyCat

Senior Member
Hi,

I hadn't really appreciated how "young" was Basic when I first used it, via a teleprinter over a telephone line to a "time-sharing" IBM360 (as above) a few miles away, probably in 1969. It was really "fast" compared with waiting at least overnight for the stack of 80-column FORTRAN cards to come back from the air-conditioned computer room, with hopefully a few (but only a few) pages of Line Printer output . Yes, truly hand-punched cards, using an ingenious mechanical device with IIRC twelve buttons and cryptic key labels. But we did have the "luxury" of just one automatic reader/printer/verifier, to show what the cards actually said. Also, some cards could be re-used, I still have burnt into my brain the individual and apparently tautological "STOP : END : FINISH" required for the simplest program.

But my first experience of "computing" was with Pegasus Autocode, probably around 1965, and as a "real engineer" (who never throws anything away) I went to a cupboard this morning and was able to take the attached photo. A Pegasus Autocode manual, a few sample cards and 5-hole tape as used by the Pegasus. It had only valves (tubes) of course, the "RAM" was a magnetic drum, the control panel had switches just like a manual telephone exchange (oh dear, I remember those as well) and the two CRTs on the front were only to display the clock waveforms (or maybe the data "eyes"). The manual refers to the "soon to be available" 10 characters/second teleprinter and the 150 cps paper tape punch with awe.

However, re-reading the manual, I'm impressed with its clarity, conciseness (only 45 pages) and the facilities available. Many functions (such as ARCTAN), floating point numbers up to 10^ +/-76 to "about 9 digits accuracy", and an ability to jump temporarily to "Machine Instructions". The main limitations seem to have been: only one operator per line (now where have I seen that recently?), that labels could be only "a small integer followed by a )" and a "subroutine" consisted of assigning a label of the next line in the program to a variable, with the "return" being a jump to that stored variable!

Pegasus-Img1838.jpg

But sorry, I still don't consider myself an OF !

Cheers, Alan.
 

Dippy

Moderator
I don't consider myself an OF either but the graduates at work do and I'm probably 20 years younger than you. Just give in to reality Allycat ;)
 

Circuit

Senior Member
AllyCat, your photo is fascinating. Most especially, the spelling of "computer programme". Historically, Americans always wrote "program" and this seems to have been adopted to differentiate a "computer program" from a "theatre programme" or "television programme" in the UK. It is very interesting to see this 1958 English computer manual using the "correct" spelling. Perhaps this is a good foundation and reasoning for the UK to go back to using the -mme version. So how about taking a "Bletchley Park Rules OK" approach and readopting "computer programme". But now, of course, we are becoming straddled with the even more repellent term "app"!
 

AllyCat

Senior Member
Hi,

Yes, I must admit that I adopted "Program" some time ago for computer use (only) but equally dislike the term "Apps".

IMHO the whole manual is beautifully written, with some parts still very relevant today (perhaps particularly to PIcaxe). I'm almost tempted to scan and post it, but 45 pages (of "foolscap" size) would not be trivial and there is still that copyright symbol on the front cover. But one part of the section on "Running the Autocode Programme" did make me smile:

"(5) At the end of the master Autocode tape, the computer will stop and the light labelled "STOP ORDER 77" will go on. The computer will hoot when it stops if the key labelled "HOOT ON STOP" is down.

Actually, I misquoted the manual in my previous post, "Machine Instructions" are referred to as "Machine Orders". Also of note is that the first line of most programs is "STOP" (to wait for the user to load a data tape). At first sight that's nearly as silly as having to press a "Start" button to turn a machine off ..... but then no one would do that would they? ;)

Cheers, Alan.
 

inglewoodpete

Senior Member
My introduction to mainframe computers and hollerith cards was in about 1980 (with Cyber Corporation's Cyber 73 and Cyber 74).

I didn't witness the event but was told of an older programmer, also called Peter who was outputting data to "punch cards" as they were called. "Punch Card Pete" got his program(programme) into an infinite loop, outputting one card for every loop. The card magazine was even refilled once before it was realised that several thousand identically punched cards had been produced! I guess it wasn't the first time this happened in the world.
 

inglewoodpete

Senior Member
My introduction to mainframe computers and hollerith cards was in about 1980 (with Cyber Corporation's Cyber 73 and Cyber 74).

I didn't witness the event but was told of an older programmer, also called Peter who was outputting data to "punch cards" as they were called. "Punch Card Pete" got his program(programme) into an infinite loop, outputting one card for every loop. The card magazine was even refilled once before it was realised that several thousand identically punched cards had been produced! I guess it wasn't the first time this happened in the world.
 
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