BASIC lang turns 60 yrs old!

[OpenXTalkPaul]

Probably most of us old nerds were introduced to programming with some flavor of BASIC:
For me it was ATARI BASIC on an Atari400 with the terrible 'chicklet keys' keyboard.
I also had a little bit of experience with Tandy TRS-80 BASIC at the local RadioShack and also at school a few years later when I got to middle school. And lastly much later I purchased FutureBASIC specifically so I could get into building Xternals for HyperCard. I still sort-of like BASIC. It's more readable to me than a lot of other programming languages. I think HC / xTalk just spoiled me.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05 ... -turns-60/

[tperry2x]

My first experience with any programming language was on a commodore64, staring at stuff like this for hours on end. Just to make a few pixels appear on screen (hopefully)

c64.jpg (79.4 KiB) Viewed 79 times

[richmond62]

In 1975 I started with MiniFORTRAN, and then FORTRAN IV, so BASIC in late 1976 cames as a breath of fresh air.

[OpenXTalkPaul]

My first experience with any programming language was on a commodore64, staring at stuff like this for hours on end. Just to make a few pixels appear on screen (hopefully)

c64.jpg

Ah yes, the peeking and poking at memory locations! It was so 'low level', lol ! It made me feel like Super-Hacker-Man once I could forward the data from the Atari Paddles to its sound-chip, thanks mostly to the game listings in Compute! Magazine, so then I could 'live code' "music" with those crazy lo-fi Atari noises and drive my family (more) nuts, lol!

I had friends growing up that were adamant about Commodore and the venerable C=64, it was kind of similar to NES hardware-wise, my Atari 8-bit was basically the same as the Atari 5200 game console hardware. I knew a couple of people who stuck with Atari out of interest in MIDI music, maybe because Cubase started out as an ATARI ST app. Not sure any of the C64 users went to Amiga though. I vaguely remember being jealous of Commodore users because C64 did seem to have a bigger 'scene' around it, and looking at Commodore's BASIC later on it did also seem to have a bit higher-level (which obviously is good IMO) 'API' like with access to hardware. My Dad brought home a Mac (which I still have) with HyperCard, sometime around 1987 and that was it for me from then on.