Birth of Basic.

[VP9KS]

So close!

"Simons' Basic"

The dude's surname was "Simons".

Simons' BASIC - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Man, I can remember that but I can't remember what I ate for lunch yesterday.

thanks for keeping me straight, mate. Betty will tell you that it's a full time job.

 

[VP9KS]

Haven't even thought about BASIC in over a decade. I know FreeBasic and PureBasic used to make
BASIC for Linux. Commodore 64 and Apple II here I come. Way back in the day, I did a little Pascal
as well. I think GNU still makes a Pascal compiler.

PureBasic - A powerful BASIC programming language

Powerful BASIC programming language for Windows, Linux, OS X and Raspberry generating small and fast 32-bit or 64-bit native executables, without external dependencies.

www.purebasic.com

FreeBASIC Language | Home

Oh, Look! It's the little Martian Dude! Where's the kaboom? There was supposed to be an earthshattering Kaboom!

 

[KGIII]

thanks for keeping me straight, mate.

I still have no idea how I remembered that after all these years.

It sure is strange the stuff that sticks with you. Those brain cells are probably better off storing something more useful, but here we are...

 

[sofasurfer]

On my Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer I wrote a program to catalog all my flea market and garage sale items. I could list items by catagory, purchase or sale date, price, profit. Also total inventory spend/sold/profit,etc. Life was so good and BASIC back then.

 

[KGIII]

TRS-80 Color Computer

I had a Trash 80, technically two. Mine was decidedly not color. I want to say one was green screen and the other let me pick between green and amber with a switch on the back.

I could easily be conflating that with another computer from those years.

My first use of a programmable computer was in the early 70s. It was also around that time that we could ask for time on the mainframe at Dartmouth.

 

[Dart]

Sadly, I know I've seen both of those movies and I couldn't possibly help you out on that.

Ain't gotta darned clue which movie that was.

It was a tongue in cheek thing, to showoff my steller memory... Or lack there of.

 

[Brickwizard]

It was a tongue thing, to showoff my steller memory... Or lack there of.

I think you picked the wrong day to give up smoking!

 

[VP9KS]

I had a Trash 80, technically two. Mine was decidedly not color. I want to say one was green screen and the other let me pick between green and amber with a switch on the back.

I could easily be conflating that with another computer from those years.

My first use of a programmable computer was in the early 70s. It was also around that time that we could ask for time on the mainframe at Dartmouth.

Back in the 80s I was a member of one of the rescue squads in Virginia Beach. The squad had a Trash 80 at the station, used to maintain the "lead-in book". I had upgraded to a C128 at the time, and I replicated the program in a Database for it, so that I could sit in my pajamas, and maintain it at home. The C128 was a really nice upgrade from the C64. I also bought the RGB monitor, the mouse, the ram expansion unit, the 1571 5.25 inch double sided drive, the 1581 3.5 inch double sided drive, and a Hayes 1200 baud smart modem. I was running with the big dogs! I wish that I still had them. That 1581 drive introduced me to the concept of Partitioning drives.

 

[wizardfromoz]

Johnny, what do you make of this?

This? Why, I can make a hat or a brooch or a pterodactyl...

 

[sphen]

The younger people here may not know how those early personal computers worked. You turned them on and saw a 1 character prompt and a blinking cursor on a terminal screen. It was the BASIC prompt.

At that point you could type in a program line by line like this: 10 FOR I=1 TO 5 ... 20 PRINT "COUNTER = "; I ... 30 NEXT I ... 40 END

If you type LIST or RUN, then the one program in memory lists itself or runs and you see the output on the terminal. (I forget how you stopped endless loops back then.)

You could also SAVE a program by connecting the audio out jack to the microphone input of a cassette recorder and pressing the record and play buttons together on the recorder. You could LOAD a program by connecting the audio output of a cassette recorder to the input of the computer and pressing the play button on the cassette recorder.

You had only one program at a time in memory.

There was no operating system, just the BASIC interpreter with its prompt. The operating system came when they introduced 5 inch floppy drives for those computers.

 

[sofasurfer]

Some might find this interesting.

TRS-80 Color Computer Manual https://colorcomputerarchive.com/re...e/Color Computer Operation Manual (Tandy).pdf

Color Computer 2 Manual https://www.manualslib.com/manual/983529/Radio-Shack-Trs-80-Color-Computer-2.html

Color Computer Archive https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Manuals/Hardware/

 

[KGIII]

If you want to bring back some memories:

TRS-80 Model III Emulator

(That's an online TRS-80 emulator in JavaScript.)

I kinda hated that era of computing and I do not look back on it with all that much fondness. Zork was pretty cool, so there's that. I actually have a Trash 80 II in the basement (in what I call my lab). There's a few things in there, like a Vic 20 with a broken power brick. You could use the Vic 20 power brick to warm your feet, so of course it's broken. They always broke.

Oh, and FLOG was kinda fun, once you understood it. It was a golf game that relied on a lot of math.