[HN Gopher] Rocky Mountain Basic
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Rocky Mountain Basic
Author : mattowen_uk
Score : 47 points
Date : 2021-12-22 13:18 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| avgcorrection wrote:
| elbybasolis wrote:
| After college I was doing some consulting and working on few very
| different projects. One of which was helping a company maintain
| an estimating program written by their founding engineer written
| in RMB. The software would prompt the user for various
| information and produce an estimate for labor, materials,
| equipment, and time.
|
| It was pretty simple, well commented code, and for a while I was
| able to make small changes with a VM and HTBasic
| (http://www.techsoft.de/documents/htbasic.html). They weren't
| using any of the advanced features of the language. It was
| essentially a cli.
|
| Eventually we ported it to TypeScript with a modern frontend. Now
| they can do estimates in the field and integrate it with loads of
| other software they adopted recently for invoicing, scheduling
| etc.
| quaintdev wrote:
| I had no idea what programming was when I was 12 but I was very
| interested in Computers. Back then there was no Internet here in
| India so I used to explore every feature of Windows 98/ME and all
| the Software installed. What always intrigued me was how these
| .exe files are created because I could create every other file
| like(.bmp, .jpg, .doc, etc,.) with the Software installed but not
| .exe
|
| We had IT in our school but all they taught was how to use word,
| excel and skipped this chapter in book which was "Programming
| with QBasic". I did not touch that chapter because it did not
| have fancy screenshots like other chapter and seemed boring. I
| use to think Command prompt was a dumb Software and this chapter
| had one screenshot of cmd.
|
| And then one day I took a closer look at that screenshot. It had
| 2 window screenshots, the window on the left had
| 10 INPUT "ENTER ANY NUMBER: ", N 20 FOR I = 1 TO 10
| 30 PRINT N,"X",I,"=",N*I 40 NEXT I
|
| The window on right, was showing a prompt for "ENTER ANY NUMBER:
| " 8.
|
| Entire table of 8 was printed below. I was blown away. I had
| never seen computer doing what I tell it to until then and
| honestly it was like I found a super power that day. Soon I
| realized that my dad who is headmaster and nothing to do with
| programming has 1 thick book on "Programming with GWBASIC" from
| his school, needless to say I read that entire book within few
| days. That started my journey into Software Development. I am so
| glad today that I took a closer look at that screenshot. I still
| could not generate .exe back then because those compilers were
| hard to come by but finally my buddy who had access to Internet
| got me the compiler and I generated .exe. It felt amazing.
|
| tl;dr I owe my Software Development career to BASIC.
| Minor49er wrote:
| When I was really young, I opened a few .exe files in Notepad
| to try to figure out how they were created. I remember at one
| point seeing all of the garbage character output and thought,
| "wow, someone wrote and understands all of this?"
| seryoiupfurds wrote:
| Conversely, I didn't have much luck renaming my basic
| programs to .exe.
| deckard1 wrote:
| this is how I switched from GW-BASIC to QuickBASIC. I found
| out that QB could make .exe files like a big boy compiler.
|
| Switching to QuickBASIC was like stepping into the future,
| coming from GW-BASIC. No more line numbers. Actual
| subroutines. A quite nice IDE that separates out
| subroutines similar to the code browser in
| Smalltalk/Squeak.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| One of my first program was something like:
|
| - What is your name?
|
| - <name> is dumb, haha
| drewzero1 wrote:
| Me too. One time I messed with my friend by adding a
| conditional to complement every name except his.
|
| 10 PRINT "WHAT IS YOUR NAME"; 20 INPUT NAME$ 30 IF NAME$ =
| "BILL" THEN 40 PRINT NAME$+" SOUNDS LIKE A NAME FOR A DORK!"
| 50 ELSE 60 PRINT NAME$+" SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT NAME!" 70 END IF
|
| I also tried to prank people with a program I wrote that
| mimicked a BSOD, but I couldn't get anyone to fall for it.
|
| PS- No hard feelings between me and NAME$, one of the few
| high school friends I still spend time with. He still
| remembers the program and laughs.
| ygra wrote:
| Ha, I too found the GWBASIC manual at home in a bookshelf and
| just read it. Afterwards I asked my father whether he had
| GWBASIC somewhere and he provided me with QBasic, which had
| integrated help (so I didn't have to refer to that 500-page
| tome). From there I eventually went to Turbo Pascal and later
| Visual Basic and much later to lots of other languages.
|
| I still wonder sometimes what the modern equivalent to learn
| programming would be. Most modern programming languages are
| infinitely more capable, but the hurdle to start is also a lot
| higher in many cases. JavaScript is probably equivalent in that
| it's available everywhere, but there's so much you have to at
| least understand a bit before you can really write some code
| ...
| rvieira wrote:
| I had a similar experience. I was around 12, had a ZX Spectum
| and wrote a couple of lines to draw a circle on the TV. I was
| amazed too at this new super power, where I could "tell my TV"
| where to draw a circle just by changing a couple of numbers.
|
| Ironically, as developing software becomes increasingly
| complex, I feel more and more like it's the machine telling me
| what to do XD
| stevekemp wrote:
| Similar age for me, also with a ZX Spectrum - I guess that
| dates us, and our location pretty well.
|
| I've posted this before, but it's always a fun trip down
| memory-lane:
|
| https://blog.steve.fi/how_i_started_programming.html
| gwbas1c wrote:
| When I logged into my first dial-up BBS, I had no idea what to
| use as my handle. My manual for GWBasic was sitting in front of
| me.
|
| 25 years later I'm GWBas1c on Hacker news.
| quaffapint wrote:
| Damn, I should have been C64SysRef.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| I should have been loadquotestarquotecomma8comma1.
| reaperducer wrote:
| The password i used for CompuServe was my modem model number.
| Same reason.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| That is about the most "HN" comment I have ever read (or at
| least "nerd", in the positive sense).
| tessierashpool wrote:
| In a way I do too. I learned BASIC as a child, before learning
| any "real" language or domain. I talk to people who are
| starting from scratch with JavaScript and I try to convince
| them to start with Scheme or something instead, because
| starting with something that just taught me the ideas of
| programming, without doing anything truly useful, turned out to
| be a huge advantage later on in life. I didn't think about the
| browser, the DOM, the operating system, or any real-world use
| case, just 20 GOTO 10 and getting the computer to print silly
| words.
| ahdh8f4hf4h8 wrote:
| In the mid 2000s I worked at company that used Rocky Mountain
| Basic in a ton of their products (electrical test equipment.)
| Most of their product lines dated back to 1960s and 1970s, and
| the software portions consisted of assembler, Fortran, C, and
| Basic. We were in the middle of a project porting some older
| Basic code to RMB when the division was shutdown due to 2008
| financial crisis. (It effectively killed some parts of the
| industry for a few years.)
|
| Sadly, a lot of the really old code was much easier to maintain
| than most of the code I work on today. The company had an
| excellent engineering culture, and thorough design and
| documentation was the norm rather than the exception.
| prosaic-hacker wrote:
| In fall 1975 in my senior year of High school, I toured the local
| Junior College (Vanier CEGEP) and saw a lab with a HP 9830A
| driving a HP flatbed plotter producing Biorhythm plots. I applied
| to that college and a year later the lab become my second home. I
| learned the 9830A Rocky Mountain Basic, wrote and shared many
| program on cassette tapes. The most fun was shared game we called
| Cosmic Pinball. Shells fired at static planets with the ballistic
| plots drawn out on the flatbed plotter. Longest run took 18
| minutes before it finally hit 1 of the 7 planets. I should
| rewrite it in python.
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