Working Daze by John Zakour and Scott Roberts for June 17, 2021

Only throwing back to Basic? Not assembly or straight up machine code?

Scott, just saw your answer to my question. Thanks and a very happy belated birthday.

Speaking of BASIC, have you heard about the programmers doomed to live out their lives in the shower? Well the instructions on the shampoo bottle say -

1: Lather.

2: Rinse.

3: Repeat.

BASIC — running in on an Apple II simulator? Or (gasp) an Altair simulator?

Those were the days. Using a goto was still ok.

Isn’t BASIC what they ran on the Trash 80?

Back in the 60s… when 4k was awesome… machine-code used less memory and was faster in use than higher language programs… Just a lot longer to write initially…

Near the start of my career, I wrote programs on a PDP-8. More than once, when I couldn’t get to the development box to make a new tape, I’d use our cut-and-splice editor to change holes to tape and tape to holes.

I wanted to write a language that had the business capabilities of COBOL but was as easy to use as BASIC. I’d call it BASBOL.

I had to learn BASIC with the school’s HP 2100A in addition to learning FORTRAN on an IBM 360 to solve engineering homework in 1974. Later built a Sinclair ZX80 to learn assembly at home just for fun. Programming was just a chore to get the actual job done, which was to design and build plant equipment.

I wrote an endless loop in basic. The Dean of Engineering was NOT impressed. Endless loops are easy to write. Takes maybe four lines of code.

E.T. would like to share a comment…

The only code i know is MORSE

Given that the dialog is all upper case, it’s hard to tell if they mean “basic” or “BASIC.” :)

Nice TARDIS, though.

Thats sweet, Roy has less toys now that they have Rey.

Interpreted or compiled?

BASIC was the only ‘fun’ code I ever messed with. All the rest were quite perplexing to me.

Happy 39th Birthday to the 13th Doctor, Jodie Whittaker

I had fun playing around with BASIC. I wrote things like a random dice rolling program for playing D&D. I wrote a program for converting Roman numerals to Arabic and Arabic to Roman. Things like that. It was fun.

Brings back memories of hours playing GORILLA.BAS

(It was included with DOS 5.)

0001 LDA 0110

0010 LDB 0111

0011 ADD

0100 STR 0110

0101 JMP 0001

0110 0000

0111 0001

check out the poster.

Of course!

Best spaghetti code ever!!

Unfortunately, there are almost as many varieties of BASIC as dialects of Chinese. On job interviews, the first thing I had to do was figure how dumb their version of BASIC was.

I did my first BASIC programing on a little computer made by ATARI; it was pretty simple, but it gave me a feeling of power that I could tell the machine what to do and it would do it.