BASIC 1964

[CP/M User]

Just something I just pondered over.

Does anyone know if the original BASIC written in 1964 support any graphics? If not, would anyone know which (e.g. APL?,PL/I?, Logo - This one came out in 1967 & would have thought it came with Turtle Graphics)?
Naturally, Assembly would have been one (if not the first to bring in
some graphics - as long as the machine supports it), but could someone
suggest which High level language have some support for it?

Oh well, if you haven't guessed yet, I'm a little keen about the Graphics
side of things (even though I like my Command line OSes!)

Ta.

Cheers.

 

[erd]

BASIC in 1964 would have been used with a TTY, commonly an ASR-33. "Graphics" would have been ASCII punctuation and uppercase letters.

There are some games from the 1970s that use ASCII graphics - Star Trek games come to mind (one of the more famous examples is called "SPACWAR" which is *not* the same as the PDP-1 Spacewar).

While machines like the PDP-8 supported BASIC and could address vector hardware, I don't believe the two mixed.

IIRC, in the case of the PDP-8, obviously assembler was the common choice for graphics, followed, I would expect, by FORTRAN.

BASIC didn't begin to support graphics until micrcomputers came with memory-mapped displays - the TRS-80, the Apple and the Commodore PET are famous examples. I don't know about the history of BASIC on CP/M machines, but perhaps someone here could chime in with their recollections.

-ethan

 

[CP/M User]

"erd" wrote in message:

> BASIC in 1964 would have been used with a TTY, commonly an
> ASR-33. "Graphics" would have been ASCII punctuation and
> uppercase letters.

> There are some games from the 1970s that use ASCII graphics -
> Star Trek games come to mind (one of the more famous examples
> is called "SPACWAR" which is *not* the same as the PDP-1
> Spacewar).

The BASIC Star Trek certainally brought about many variations
& was even written in a number of other languages (Pascal being
one).

> While machines like the PDP-8 supported BASIC and could address
> vector hardware, I don't believe the two mixed.

I see you point. The trouble I find with BASIC is incorporating
a number low-level routines into it. At the same time if the
first version of BASIC was written so it would include
graphical abilities of the PDP-8, then it would have been more
restricted (graphical programming is such a big machine
specific).

> IIRC, in the case of the PDP-8, obviously assembler was the
> common choice for graphics, followed, I would expect, by
> FORTRAN.

Yes, I could perhaps see that. FORTRAN is very good language for
mathematical programming & vector graphics slide into that field
too.

> BASIC didn't begin to support graphics until micrcomputers came
> with memory-mapped displays - the TRS-80, the Apple and the
> Commodore PET are famous examples. I don't know about the
> history of BASIC on CP/M machines, but perhaps someone here
> could chime in with their recollections.

I'm not too sure if GSX (Graphical System Extension) provides any
support for BASIC (maybe perhaps, but I don't exactly use it
since I look to the machine for programming). MBASIC (in CP/M-86
is perhaps the closest thing graphics could be brought in,
however CBASIC86 maybe able to as well - but it's so hard writing
routines to perform this in CBASIC). BASIC in CP/M doesn't seem
to support graphics mainly because of it being a machine specific
thing (so the user would have to write them, depending on their
machine). On top of CBASIC (which Digital Research wrote) they
also wrote another BASIC which was a MBASIC clone!

Cheers.

 

[Barry]

I'm not sure what year this was. Probably about 1970 or so. A friend of mine who wasn't a programmer had a PDP-8 at work and was on a project where he could take advantage of it but he had no idea how so I went in with him one evening after work and we played with the PDP-8 and Basic to see if I could figure out how to help him. It was just for that one day but it was the only time I ever saw Basic or even heard of it till my first exposure to an Apple years later. It was also the only Dec computer I ever saw.

There was no opportunity for graphics on this machine. The interface was with a TTY and the only output was to the TTY or to a plotter which neither he nor I knew anything about. I don't know if Basic could deal with the plotter but nothing in the manual referred to it.

The manual was 2 sheets of 8.5x11 paper folded and stapled into an 8 page booklet. It seemed fairly complete in that if there was nothing obvious left out.

Variables were only 1 letter long so there could only be 26 of them. There were no subscripts as far as I can recall but I'm not sure of that. There were no strings or string functions except on the print statement and that could only take constant strings. There were no string variables. In fact there were no data types. The variables were numeric. There was no option for single or double precision. I don't recall what the precision was.

There were no GOSUBs. Only GOTOs.

I suspect that graphics for that Basic was a distant dream.

This was a language for doing calculations and printing out the results. I doubt that it could do anything else.

Keep in mind that I only had that one day's exposure to it and that was decades ago so I might not remember all this correctly. But that is how I remember it.

Barry