Remembering BASIC on its 50th birthday

the rocketry show
Advertise with us
Onebadhawk
The Rocketry Forum

Help Support The Rocketry Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Winston

Winston

Lorenzo von Matterhorn
Joined
Jan 31, 2009
Messages
9,560
Reaction score
1,749
https://time.com/69316/basic/

Rocketry company tie-in which acted to popularize BASIC;

"By letting non-computer scientists use BASIC running on the DTSS, Kemeny, Kurtz and their collaborators had invented something that was arguably the first real form of personal computing. But it didn’t yet involve personal computers. That revolution got jump-started a decade later, when a New Mexico model rocket company called MITS launched the Altair 8800, the $497 build-it-yourself microcomputer ($621 assembled) that launched the PC revolution."

Model Rocketry magazine's mention of MITS telemetry modules is on page 5:

https://www.ninfinger.org/rockets/ModelRocketry/Model_Rocketry_v02n07_04-70.pdf
 
Last edited:
rocketguy101 said:
Forrest Mims III from MITS wrote several articles for MRm....plus a boatload of books for Radio Shack!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forrest_Mims

I met him at a model rocket conference in New Mexico while I was in high school...very nice guy.
Click to expand...
Never had the priviledge of meeting him, but definitely knew of him from his books and electronics magazine project articles. Love this photo from the Wikipedia page on this very accomplished guy. The USAF in Vietnam Big Bertha, when small grass fires didn't really matter much:

Forrest_Mims_Rocket_Vietnam_1967_Cropped.jpg
 
I learned BASIC on a TRS 80 (from Radio Shack) back in 1978. Recorded the programs on a cassette. Fun.
 
rocketguy101 said:
read his articles in MRm about modrocs in Vietnam...he attracted some unwanted attention with his first launch :)
Click to expand...
I'll have to look those up. Sound like an interesting history combination - Vietnam + model rockets. On that unwanted attention, I'll bet it was something like, "Incoming!"
 
Hmmmm, Interesting. When I started at a small college in 1974, had a Hewlett-Packard minicomputer with 8k core and a hard drive that I believe was 20mb that was in a big cassette that was shoved into the drive tower. There were three languages, Assembler, Fortran and HP Basic. Had a high speed tape drive and when turning on the computer, one had to set the initial starting Octal address on the front panel, take a small "bootstrap" tape, run it through the tape reader to initialize the memory, then load and fire the operating system tape (either Assembler, Fortran or Basic) through the high speed tape reader.
I'm still impressed to this day that the tape reader spit through a very long length of punched mylar tape in 30 seconds or so. The teletype then clanked/spelled out READY if the process went smoothly. I was told by the class geek that Assembler and Fortran were compiled languages and I eventually learned how to compile a fortran program to make the "executable". It was comparable to compiling a C program I guess today and that Basic was an interpreter and required more overhead. Basic was easier for "laypeople" to learn and Basic compilers came later.
I remember the class geek explaining Darpanet to me and I distinctly remember him saying, "It's like an Inter-network." He likely came up with that on his own
just by coincidence. This was in about '75 I heard this and it turned out prophetic.
 
KarlS said:
I learned BASIC on a TRS 80 (from Radio Shack) back in 1978. Recorded the programs on a cassette. Fun.
Click to expand...

Me, too, though for me it was 1980 - 1981.

What's scary is I remember more of the Z-80 instruction set than I do the specifics of programming in BASIC on a TRS-80.

-Kevin
 
KarlS said:
I learned BASIC on a TRS 80 (from Radio Shack) back in 1978. Recorded the programs on a cassette. Fun.
Click to expand...

My friends had TRS 80s, but I had a commodore 64. I remember things really got interesting when I learned to Peek and Poke. I've been Peeking and Poking in various ways ever since.
 
At home, I had an Atari 400 with a basic cartridge, used a magnetic tape drive for program storage. In addition to basic, I fought with 6502 assembly programming which seemed the only way to do "fast" graphics on that beast. Mostly, it was a game console :)
 
BASIC sucks. I spent years in the 80's and 90's doing point-of-sale software development using IBM 4680 BASIC.
 
I learned BASIC on a DEC PDP/8e. The I/O device was a teletype. If you wanted to store a program, you had it punch it out on paper tape.

If we wanted a mouse we had to whittle it ourselves. Uphill! Both ways!
 
StefanJ said:
I learned BASIC on a DEC PDP/8e. The I/O device was a teletype. If you wanted to store a program, you had it punch it out on paper tape.

If we wanted a mouse we had to whittle it ourselves. Uphill! Both ways!
Click to expand...

And we LIKED it that way!

Harrumph...
 
Our Trash 80's were so old and primitive that we had to fire up boiler to make steam before we could run a program. The monitor was lit by kerosene.
harumphhhh.
 
BASIC took up a lot of my hours when I was a teenager. Actually if I wasn't making rockets or re-reading American Spacemodeling, I was writing programs in BASIC to do almost anything you could think of. I made a CP calculator in BASIC as part of my senior science project. I made a scoring program for a bowling game, although I never had any hope of using it to score a real-world game. I can't remember if I ever perfected that one or not. It was pretty darn complex.
 
I used to program in Microsoft Quickbasic when I was in high school. I haven't done any computer programming since then and I don't know if I remember enough to even do it anymore.
 
In the nineties, I wrote a lot of programs for the lab I worked for - specialized databases, reporting programs and such - didn't learn Excel until much later, and I could customize the layout to my purposes. This was all using Quickbasic.

Remember when all computers came with BASIC not only native, but it was the boot language? There is a RiscOS disk image that does that now for the Raspberry Pi - just the thing it you're putting your Pi in and old Commodore Pet or Apple II case! ;)
 
It was AppleSoft for me.....back in 80-81. Apple IIs.

We loved Zork and made our own game....first on a Vic20, but ran it out of memory....then on to a 64. We bounced it back and forth from my C64 to my buddy's Apple IIc.....

(oh yeah, forgot about SmartBASIC, on a Coleco Adam.....)
 
Last edited:
StefanJ said:
I learned BASIC on a DEC PDP/8e. The I/O device was a teletype. If you wanted to store a program, you had it punch it out on paper tape.

If we wanted a mouse we had to whittle it ourselves. Uphill! Both ways!
Click to expand...

ThirstyBarbarian said:
And we LIKED it that way!

Harrumph...
Click to expand...

rocketguy101 said:
when Men were Men, and Women were glad...
Click to expand...

Yes. 1971 and a 4K PDP/8e. BASIC was actually my second language as FOCAL was the native DEC Language. What a difference in capability when we went from 4K to 8K of core. I was able to perform all kinds of chemical kinetics modeling runs.....

The best BASIC I've used was 87BASIC which was developed at Physical Sciences Inc. by one of my former co-workers Steve Fried who later founded Microway in 1982. Steve was the first to develop and market languages and operating system software for the 8087 coprocessor that could be added to the IBM PC. It revolutionized scientific computing as 87BASIC was a compiled language up to 1000x faster than interpretative BASIC and just a fast as 87FORTRAN but with better Realtime I/O. GM used it to computerize their crash test facility in the early 80s.

Bob
 

Latest posts

Back
Top