• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Favorite Retro Computer Programming Environment

I

idflyfish

Experienced Member
Joined
Aug 22, 2010
Messages
61
Location
Boise Idaho
Hello all,

There are a ton of programming environments out there for the various retro computers we all know and love. I thought I would start a thread to see if we can get some discussion going on these various programming environments. So here is the question.

What is your favorite retro computer programming environment and why?

My favorite is TurboForth for the TI-99/4a.
http://www.turboforth.net/

Why?
- Forth is a super cool language that is unlike anything I have ever worked in. (I am a C#, Javascript, SQL developer).
- TurboForth came out of the TI-99/4a retro community. and is actively being improved.
- TurboForth gives you near ASM speed but isn't nearly as tedious to program in.
- TurboForth includes a really well implemented editor but still allows you to write code interactively as well.
 
It would have to be BASIC for me. Even an inept 10-thumbed guy like me can make something happen once in a while.
 
You know, honestly for me QuickBasic or qbasic was the nicest. It was native on most dos systems, had a nice step through functionality and fairly straight forward errors. The biggest thing I liked which wasn't found very often for whatever reason was the help feature. I later found Borland integrated help into their products too so TurboC became an easy to learn C IDE as well but wasn't free so again, free and native is usually my choice and I could do most of what I was wanting in Basic anyway. Plus it was compatible with Basic which I already had the printed manuals that came with our 8088 so that also helped become an easy to learn language.
 
I think I'll go for good old Turbo Pascal.
It was revolutionary when it came, and it's still the only IDE I've ever liked. I've never seen the point of more modern IDEs, tried lots of them and they're rubbish. I'm also of the opinion that any language or application which require an IDE to locate functions and the like is broken by design.
But Turbo Pascal had a useful IDE, I tried it again recently and I still like it. And the language itself made Pascal useful, with its practical extensions and speedy development.

- Tor
 
I enjoyed (DOS) Turbo Pascal as well. It was a great IDE. Spent a lot of time with it, I guess I had TP6? Can't remember specifically - it's still loaded on my main dos box.

Spent quite a lot of time in Applesoft BASIC (and mostly preferred it under ProDOS) due to my long-standing interest in Apple II...

But good old WordStar was a great environment for 8080/Z80 ASM, and cut my teeth on MBASIC.
 
Environment? :huh: I still use command-line invoked editors and compilers. A good operating system is pretty essential, but I try not to do my programming on the computer, but away from it where I can think.
 
I think some modern IDEs can still learn a thing or two from good old Turbo Pascal 5.5. You could get immediate help for any selected keyword just by pressing ctrl-F1, and the help was actually meaningful and useful! Very well integrated, you never had to mess around with a command line unless you wanted to get fancy and automate things, and the debugger was dead simple to use. And code in the Pascal programming language itself was almost always more readable than anything in a "C" style language. Very little ambiguity and keywords were in more or less plain English!

The mention of Fouth reminds me of an interesting story I read about how EasyWriter (by John Draper AKA Captain Crunch) was written in Fourth and ported over to the brand new IBM PC in just a few days. http://www.webcrunchers.com/stories/easywriter.html

Of course, the best programming environment is a soldering iron! :)
 
I really like Turbo Pascal also, but I think I'll throw in a vote for the UCSD P-System.

I very much enjoyed using this system on the Apple II (and the fact that it helped me get my homework done!). It felt solid. I didn't know much about its history and cross-platform nature until much later.

- Earl
 
I'll also vote for Turbo Pascal. Back in the mid-80's it was revolutionary in so many ways. The integrated editor/compiler was lightning fast, drop-dead-easy to use, and so compact that I used to keep TP on the 8" diskette that our Uni courses required us to have for assignments just so I could use the WordStar-like editor to edit my COBOL assignments. It was also reasonably priced (even here in Australia, where software is generally expensive) for a student to afford. Regarding Retrobit's comment, I recall seeing the UCSD P-System on an Apple ][ but I recall it required a lot of floppy swapping to get anything done.
Edit: I was thinking about what I wrote here, yesterday, and puzzled myself over my comment about having TP on an 8" diskette. Then my addled brain recalled that I did indeed require an 8" diskette for coursework, but this was for use on the Uni's CP/M machines, of which they had a roomful un by the statistics faculty for student use. Seperately, Turbo Pascal was small enough to fit onto a single IBM-formatted 5-1/4" floppy with my COBOL computing science assignments in the same year, nothing to do with the 8" diskette. Funny how the brain gets muddled at times, when recalling things from long ago.
 
Last edited:
1944GPW said:
Regarding Retrobit's comment, I recall seeing the UCSD P-System on an Apple ][ but I recall it required a lot of floppy swapping to get anything done.
Click to expand...
Exactly! That was the problem. I did some very interesting programming with the UCSD P-System, but on one project I had to use 4 floppy drives connected to the Apple ][, there was some kind of swap-to-floppy you could enable for the editor IIRC. I don't remember how it worked really, only that all four drives were necessary. And then there was only some tiny amount of RAM available before the editor didn't have room for any more source code.

-Tor
 
I mostly write in the Assembly language of the target system...I prefer Intel 8080 mnemonics, the later style as found in CP/M's assembler. PDP-11 asm is fun too, it feels more or less modern. I find 6502 asm to be surprisingly similar.
 
I guess I'm old school.

I like a pad and pencil. Then I hand assemble and work out the octal and enter it either from the front panel if its short or using a modified version of the turnkey monitor that works with my SIO card.

As I said I'm old school. If I wanted to actually compile something I'd feel like I was at work where I program and compile stuff. If I have to resort to compiling for something using an asm file, I modify it to work with Dave Dunfield's assembler that comes with his northstar stuff and I run it in dosbox on my Mac.

Cheers,
Corey
 
That's allegedly how Wozniak wrote the debug monitor on the Apple 1 (or II)..can't quite remember without googling but the source code was on paper and he converted it to ML and typed it in directly.
 
That's the way we all used to do it before the wide availability of newfangled things such as CRTs and the like. This is why God made coding forms.

Write the code in pencil; desk-check it several times. We old timers would then send it to be keypunched; you'd get the cards back and run an 80-80 listing on the 407 and compare what you wrote with what the gal (they were pretty much all women back then) punched. Patch the deck with any errors you found and any second thoughts you had and submit the code to the I/O desk to be run, along with any tapes that were required. You could see the result of your job in mere hours. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Paper is a wonderful tool for keeping your thought processes straight.
 
Perhaps a stupid question, I vaguely know about punch card printers but did anyone ever make a little GUI or something to select your punches then punch it out or a program to type in your program then it automatically punches it out (unless that's the same as the punch card printer). Just curious how things were improved over time with that media. Punch tape was after cards right?
 
You know, I've never tried it with coding, but I have been rediscovering how much paper and pencil do to shape and focus my thought process when I'm drawing. I like the results you can get with digital art, but it's too abstracted to really get me involved the way paper does...
 
barythrin said:
Perhaps a stupid question, I vaguely know about punch card printers but did anyone ever make a little GUI or something to select your punches then punch it out or a program to type in your program then it automatically punches it out (unless that's the same as the punch card printer). Just curious how things were improved over time with that media. Punch tape was after cards right?
Click to expand...

You're talking about a time when a picture of the Mona Lisa was printed with ASCII characters... hit multiple times to get variances in ink quantity and coverage.
GUIs didn't exist yet.
:D
 
leeb said:
You're talking about a time when a picture of the Mona Lisa was printed with ASCII characters... hit multiple times to get variances in ink quantity and coverage.
GUIs didn't exist yet.
:D
Click to expand...

Snoopy and Marilyn Monroe were popular too. :happy5:
 
Last edited:
barythrin said:
Perhaps a stupid question, I vaguely know about punch card printers but did anyone ever make a little GUI or something to select your punches then punch it out or a program to type in your program then it automatically punches it out (unless that's the same as the punch card printer). Just curious how things were improved over time with that media. Punch tape was after cards right?
Click to expand...
I think you'll have to define your question(s) a little more:

What's a "punch card printer"? To print on the card, or print the card's contents or related info on paper pages?

A GUI? GUIs and punched cards are different eras; not sure what you mean there? Unless you're talking about some vintage emulation punched cards would have been obsolete long before a machine had a GUI.

Puched cards and tapes were around more or less at the same time. I think cards of one kind or another (Jaquard's loom?) preceded tape, but tape was also around for a long time, albeit mostly in Teletype applications initially.
 
Yeah, I realize they are different eras (punch cards and GUI interfaces) but was just curious. I was thinking a low resolution point and click punch card where you could punch it and it would then send the output to a keypunch, or perhaps write your program and it would convert it to punch card format and punch the cards for you. I'm assuming the keypunch systems were manual and the user actually wrote either code or just said what holes (or physically set the bits up/down and it them punched a hole in the card)?. I guess I should look for some videos of keypunches and punch cards lol. Obviously before my time so all I've ever seen are punched cards, never the process or any improvements on what it was like punching them.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top