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Testimonies of using BASIC back in the day

Interesting reading the comments under that link. Thanks for posting.

I was a dab hand at BASIC in the day (1982-1988 ). At that time it was generally sneered upon by those in the computer science community for being unstructured, inelegant and allowing spaghetti code...a "toy" language. There is some truth in this, but I can't help thinking there was snobbery also. There were many variants of BASIC but even with 8k BASIC you could write understandable code. It was a matter of being disciplined and commenting extensively (where RAM allowed it). Once we moved past the basic (8-12k) BASICs into GW-BASIC and QuickBASIC, structural elements were there (e.g. WHILE...WEND etc.). You also had enough RAM to comment well.

I wrote some highly useful in-house programs for my work that did the job exactly as they should, and weren't hard to maintain. It was an Everyman's language.

BASIC I salute you!

Tez
 
Remember CBASIC? Lots of commercial software written in that.

(Modesty forbids) designed and wrote a multiuser BASIC for serious business applications that was still in use up until a few years ago. Initially, it started out by implementing the MCBA small business application suite, but was eventually turned toward tasks such as word processing. It was blazing fast; faster than even Microsoft compiled BASIC, even though it was interpreted P-Code.
 
I started when I was a wee kid typing in basic on the 64 with my brothers. I was only 3 when we got it...sadly i was only around 12 when it died.
Later though! I found Qbasic 4.5! I had a ton of fun with that, and still have a lot of my old software hanging around somewhere. The language was still in use by some pretty serious people making some amazing software. It was mostly hobby stuff until DirectQB came out. Then the language had a bright flash, and then died around 2005, 2006...mainly because, I think, direct QB took away some of its hobby charm, perceived approachableness to beginners, and increased vastly, the disparity between new hobbyists and seasoned programmers. The QB RPGs are still a great play, and there is one site that is still up with all the tutorials, releases, software reviews, and great links. I have very fond memories of commodore basic (which I still use), and qbasic which I actually made an inventory system for my garage with a few years ago! The entire thing fit onto one 3.5" disk, on a stripped down computer with no hard drive, booting MSDOS 5. It even has a screen saver!
 
I agree that BASIC was very useful despite its limitations.
The small interpreted basics, the Microsoft variants which I'm most familiar, were
hampered by only two significant character variable names and unparameterized
gosubs. But I still learned a lot with them, especially on the C64! :)
I didn't get to use the better BASICs due to having to move on to C in those days.
Still fond memories.
 
Snobbery certainly played a part. I started on the BBC Micro in the early 1980s so I'm obviously biased, but the direct, simple access to the hardware was great (as, if I'd ever mastered it, was the embedded assembler). I've gone on to write lots of code in other languages and I still come across sneering about BASIC from people who think programming started with JavaScript or Python.

BASIC was simple, logical and fast (enough). I wrote a QuickBASIC program to control the analytical stage of a dark matter detector in the early 1990s. It was more than fast enough to handle the incoming data stream. I even included an 'Easter egg' in the form of a space invaders clone. Don't think my supervisor ever noticed.

A couple of years ago I wrote a simple GW-BASIC program to help my kids learn their times tables. The structure was logical enough that with a bit of help they could work out what each line did. I really don't think that's the case with most other languages.
 
You want snobbery? Try being a Pascal programmer. All kinds of C snobs always preaching the supposed superiority of C.

I never found the limitations of even the interpreted BASICs terribly limiting. In fact, I found the more advanced BASICs, with their lack of direct and indirect memory addressing more limiting.

Sure, BASIC, especially the interpreted ones were terribly slow, and memory hungry, but they still get the job done!


Mind you, for all the things I've accomplished with it over the decades, I still don't like BASIC..
 
Forbidden64 said:
I started when I was a wee kid typing in basic on the 64 with my brothers. I was only 3 when we got it...sadly i was only around 12 when it died.
Later though! I found Qbasic 4.5! I had a ton of fun with that, and still have a lot of my old software hanging around somewhere. The language was still in use by some pretty serious people making some amazing software. It was mostly hobby stuff until DirectQB came out. Then the language had a bright flash, and then died around 2005, 2006...mainly because, I think, direct QB took away some of its hobby charm, perceived approachableness to beginners, and increased vastly, the disparity between new hobbyists and seasoned programmers. The QB RPGs are still a great play, and there is one site that is still up with all the tutorials, releases, software reviews, and great links. I have very fond memories of commodore basic (which I still use), and qbasic which I actually made an inventory system for my garage with a few years ago! The entire thing fit onto one 3.5" disk, on a stripped down computer with no hard drive, booting MSDOS 5. It even has a screen saver!
Click to expand...

I really don't think DirectQB had anything to do with the "demise" of QuickBASIC. It was just another assembly lib. If anything DQB helped level the field between the veterans and beginners due to its ease of use.

I think the main cause was declining DOS compatibility in Windows. XP had poor sound card support and timing/CPU usage issues, Vista had no support for DOS graphics, and 64-bit versions of Windows couldn't run DOS programs at all. There were hacks and workarounds but it was too big of a hassle for most people. As FreeBASIC started maturing more people moved to that; then QB64 came out and the rest moved to that.
 
I don't recall a lot of commercial/professional software being written in BASIC back in my early C64/MS-DOS days.
However, in Windows, Visual Basic was a very popular option, and quite a few well known programs were developed in VB.
A lot of companies also used Visual Basic for Applications as an advanced scripting language for adding functionality to their Office documents and such. You'd be surprised how advanced and mission-critical some of that stuff was/is.

But yes, for me too, BASIC was the first contact I had with a computer. My first computer was a ZX81, which started in BASIC, like so many home computers of the day (call me crazy, but what I love about the original IBM PCs is that they can boot directly into BASIC, unlike any clone).
My second computer was a Commodore 64, and it worked exactly the same way. My neighbour had an Atari 8-bit machine, and again, same thing. Friend with an MSX? Same, goes directly to BASIC.
It wasn't until later when I started using MS-DOS and Amiga systems that I even realized a computer doesn't necessarily have to boot into BASIC.
To me it felt somewhat limiting, because I had been doing some simple programming on the ZX81 and C64 from time to time, and now I had computers where I had to load a program first, before I could begin programming.
 
Scali said:
I don't recall a lot of commercial/professional software being written in BASIC back in my early C64/MS-DOS days.
Click to expand...

I sure do. At least, on the Apple ][ and C64, much commercial software that I had was either published in BASIC, or a combination of BASIC and machine language. Most was cleverly obfuscated so that it wasn't obvious.

I did that with a lot of my software, too. The first line (10) of a BASIC program would call a machine language location, where there was a $60 (RTS) waiting. The second line (20) was a REM with a copyright notice and a bad character that would halt the listing. The next line would have an unusual line number, like 1053, where another REM with a bad character was waiting. The program content would start in BASIC at 1054, and the first order of business was to display a splash screen whilst loading the necessary ML code which would be called occasionally.
 
"You want snobbery? Try being a Pascal programmer. All kinds of C snobs always preaching the supposed superiority of C."

I'll second this one. Like BASIC, I think Pascal became stereotyped as a "beginner's language" as it was pervasive in the educational system for teaching structured programming. I wrote several applications using Borland's Turbo Pascal which at the time had a very well supported library of tool kits. I really enjoyed Pascal and never struggled with any of its (very few) limitations.
 
Avia said:
"You want snobbery? Try being a Pascal programmer. All kinds of C snobs always preaching the supposed superiority of C."

I'll second this one. Like BASIC, I think Pascal became stereotyped as a "beginner's language" as it was pervasive in the educational system for teaching structured programming. I wrote several applications using Borland's Turbo Pascal which at the time had a very well supported library of tool kits. I really enjoyed Pascal and never struggled with any of its (very few) limitations.
Click to expand...

In the demoscene, Turbo Pascal was actually quite a popular language in the DOS days. Probably because it had very fast compile times even on modest machines, and it had good integration with the inline assembler and TASM.
Even the legendary Second Reality contains some Turbo Pascal code: https://github.com/mtuomi/SecondReality

I wouldn't be surprised if it was also popular in game development for the same reasons.
 
Business Basic had a surprising hold on the accounting market. The company I worked for in the early 90s was still upgrading some very old Business Basic applications which had been ported to MS-DOS. Fortunately for me, no one there recognized that the Wang Basic I used a decade earlier was related to the Business Basic they were using.
 
Scali said:
I don't recall a lot of commercial/professional software being written in BASIC back in my early C64/MS-DOS days.
Click to expand...

The commercial use of BASIC almost pre-dates microcomputers. Consider, for example, MCBA, founded in 1974 running business applications on DG, DEC, HP and TI minis (MCBA = "minicomputer business applications"). All in BASIC. I have in my library many thousand lines of their source code. Probably beats those written in DiBOL in terms of quantity.

There may be earlier examples of major commercial use of BASIC.
 
Chart Master for the Apple II and then IBM PC was probably the major piece of software for micros publicly acknowledged to have been written in Basic. I think there were some other software written in BASIC for other micros but all I can recall right now is Scriptor (type-in word processor) and some games renowned for their mediocrity.
 
Many serious applications for the C64 (I know many of you reading are snickering, but it's true despite the silly "toy" status assigned to these machines by those who didn't have them) were coded in BASIC with parts in assembly where speed was critical.
 
BASIC on the Apple II was used for crypto work--I still have a copy of Mike Lauder's "Prime Factor Basic" for the Apple. It includes such things as modular math on very large strings.

At Durango, almost every application was written in BASIC, aside from the OS and the BASIC compiler itself. Even multi-user word processing.
 
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