[HN Gopher] 101 BASIC Computer Games
___________________________________________________________________
101 BASIC Computer Games
Author : sohkamyung
Score : 168 points
Date : 2025-04-21 22:47 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| prvc wrote:
| BASIC, that is.
| esafak wrote:
| The title should be corrected.
| dang wrote:
| We've put an ASIC in there. Thanks!
| vunderba wrote:
| If you are craving a BASIC fix, I highly recommend getting a DOS
| emulator like DosBos-X and just installing a copy of Quickbasic
| 4.5 (which has a compiler among other niceties over the original
| Microsoft QBASIC). You can easily find it on the Internet
| Archive.
|
| There are modern variants like QB64, but personally I find that
| BASIC really loses a lot of its appeal/flavor when you move from
| an interpretative language to a compiled one.
|
| https://dosbox-x.com
|
| I made this a while ago and it ran beautifully in DosBox on my
| Mac:
|
| https://specularrealms.com/q-basic
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I was craving a BasicA fix, so rather than run the ROM
| extractor on an IBM, I found the extraction program with them
| extracted. No 43-line mode like qbasic... :(.
| 3036e4 wrote:
| I prefer GW-BASIC 1.0, as open sourced by Microsoft a few years
| ago, but with some changes to make it possible to build it
| easily yourself:
|
| https://gitlab.com/tkchia/GW-BASIC
|
| Also do a pip3 install pcbasic to get this great
| reimplementation of BASICA/GW-BASIC done in python for modern
| systems: http://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/
| anthk wrote:
| Or this which is lighter:
|
| http://www.moria.de/~michael/bas/
| eesmith wrote:
| Thanks for the pointer to pcbasic! I experienced nostalgia
| from doing play "cdefgab>c<bagfedc"
|
| and have it simply work.
| tuveson wrote:
| If anyone is interested, I just wrote a TinyBasic
| implementation:
|
| https://github.com/danieltuveson/dbi
| anthk wrote:
| I was afraid 'dbi' would clash with a binary on my machine
| (related to DBI), but it's fine.
|
| BTW, on Basic, I had MISSION.BAS for MBASIC.COM under CP/M.
|
| https://termbin.com/w7oe
|
| Is there any public Basic to run it? I tried bas, blassic,
| bwbasic, yours, and I had no luck.
| tuveson wrote:
| Sorry, but I'm not sure which dialect of BASIC this is -
| wish I could be more helpful here. TinyBASIC is a very
| minimal implementation (no arrays, functions, nor loops) so
| it definitely won't be able to run this program.
| anthk wrote:
| This:
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MBASIC
| pjmlp wrote:
| There is no reason to lose anything, hence why many BASIC still
| do support both ways of working.
|
| I bet many are unaware of many dynamism is still present in
| VB.NET, pity BASIC is no longer a darling language at Microsoft
| headquarters, and gets the bench on Sunday games.
| anthk wrote:
| Bas will run straight:
|
| http://www.moria.de/~michael/bas/
|
| There's no need to run QB 4.5 and a full VM.
| anta40 wrote:
| Or FreeBASIC (it has QB compatibility mode). Works fine on
| Windows/Linux/DOS. No macOS port, unfortunately.
| ZenThereWere0 wrote:
| Thank you for the dosbox-x suggestion. I am running Ubuntu on a
| newer laptop and did not have any luck getting Age of Empires
| to work in a virtual machine because of issues with DirectX on
| modern hardware. The game would render so slowly as to be
| unplayable.
|
| I installed dosbox-x out of curiosity, then saw you could load
| Windows 9x on top of it. I chose the recommended Win98SE. It
| took a bit of tweaking to get the drivers loaded for 256 color
| display and the sound card, but I was just able to play the
| game. Because DosBox emulates the machine (I think this is it,
| anyway.), there are no issues with DirectX rendering. I was
| able to play through the Ascent of Egypt learning campaign for
| the first time since 2009 or so.
|
| Maybe next I'll try to loading up a version of BASIC. I'd have
| to rewind back to 2000 or so for using Visual Basic in high
| school computer lab.
|
| Thanks again, getting to play AoE without having to buy an XP-
| era laptop, was a real treat.
| vunderba wrote:
| Nice! I think my favorite part of the original age of empires
| was the weird Latin sounding simlish of the voices
| (Pleribus!)
|
| It'll be interesting if you can get the original VB to run.
| Fun fact there was actually a visual basic for dos which
| would let you build TUIs out of extended ASCII.
| ddingus wrote:
| I saw that and was quite pleased with the idea of it all
| working nicely in say,80x50 text mode, that I proceeded to
| write a similar set of subroutines.
|
| I ended up with a pretty nice subset.
|
| Could draw a window with fields, pop a number of them up on
| top of that window, if desired.
|
| Used that to write a small pile of DOS programs which
| computed various manufacturing related values used in sheet
| metal work.
| Narishma wrote:
| > Quickbasic 4.5 (which has a compiler among other niceties
| over the original Microsoft QBASIC)
|
| QuickBasic was the original, with QBASIC being a cut down
| version of it bundled with DOS.
| jasperry wrote:
| Many happy memories of checking out books like this from my
| public library and trying to get the programs working on the C64.
| The BASIC dialect never matched exactly.
| alisonatwork wrote:
| Me too, except with the CPC. After going through enough of
| them, I got to a point I could flick through the book in the
| library and figure out what was going to work ahead of time,
| what could be adapted and what went way beyond my abilities
| (usually anything that shoveled machine code into DATA blocks).
| It was neat imagining the incredible capabilities of computers
| other than my own and then trying to figure out a way to make
| mine do something like it too.
| kreelman wrote:
| Similar for me in my early teens. I used an Australian machine
| called the Microbee,
| https://www.microbeetechnology.com.au/classic-plus-kit-compu...
|
| A clever friend of mine wrote BASIC games that he sold back
| then. I think they had a bit of Z80 assembler built into it
| too.... Can't remember what names of them were though.
|
| The 'hires' graphics mode (511*255, monochrome) were encoded
| into sprites. There were only 128 characters from memory. There
| were all sorts of tricks to try and get around that issue.
|
| The best games used the sprites plonked into char positions.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| The 'bee was how a lot of us Australians of a certain age got
| into computers. The only real competition it had was the C64
| as other things like the Apple II and IBM compatibles were
| just too expensive in comparison to that $399 intro price.
|
| It was a bit weird to program for, as you said the basic was
| not quite the same as the popular platforms. It did mean you
| learned a lot about the machine itself, how memory was laid
| out, how to get those PCG graphics right.
|
| It's funny now to be able to see very similar cultures sprang
| up around less successful machines in other countries.
| khazhoux wrote:
| Would be better if the programs were JPGs that you had to type in
| ForOldHack wrote:
| MS Office OCR works great for this, it did the Rogue.c jpegs in
| no time, but there are missing routines. I wonder if an AI
| could fill the gap.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| A listing made on a dot matrix printer that contain PETSCII
| graphic characters might make it struggle. It'd be
| interesting to see if the LLM could infer the intended
| character.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I ment fixing the missing code blocks, of would suppose
| that an LLM could fix the mangled code without OCR
| training...
| a_e_k wrote:
| Knock yourself out:
| https://archive.org/details/101basiccomputer0000davi/mode/2u...
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Updating "101 Basic Computer Games" for 2021_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26273866 - Feb 2021 (65
| comments)
| NaOH wrote:
| From your own 2023 comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36945046
|
| _Play Basic Computer Games in the Browser_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34377776 - Jan 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _Basic Computer Games (1978)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28572761 - Sept 2021 (12
| comments)
|
| _Basic Computer Games (ported to C#, Java, JavaScript, Python,
| Ruby, VB.NET)_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26188324
| - Feb 2021 (3 comments)
|
| _BASIC Computer Games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19604142 - April 2019 (120
| comments)
|
| _BASIC Computer Games (1978)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9026063 - Feb 2015 (31
| comments)
|
| _Atari Archives: BASIC Computer Games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3200133 - Nov 2011 (23
| comments)
|
| _BASIC Computer Games Book, published in 1978_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866103 - Nov 2010 (36
| comments)
|
| There's also
|
| _More Basic Computer Games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41984335 - Oct 2024 (1
| comment)
|
| _Basic Star Trek Games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42709559 - Jan 2025 (1
| comment)
|
| _BASIC Star Trek Games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43070752 - Feb 2025 (2
| comments)
|
| _Vintage Basic - Games_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25502018 - Dec 2020 (1
| comment)
| musicale wrote:
| I like the "Play BASIC Games in the Browser" link. All of
| these games should be collected into a browser-playable
| archive, along with the books and appropriate documentation.
| genghisjahn wrote:
| I loved Amiga Basic. My first taste of programming without line
| numbers.
| kbelder wrote:
| Amiga Basic still seems to me like the pinnacle of the basic
| language. Line numbers were optional, structured programming
| with loops and true functions, a graphics library... but still
| firmly BASIC. Not bits of code embedded in a UX editor, not
| some compiler-based C wannabee...
| pjmlp wrote:
| Dartmouth BASIC was designed as compiled on the fly language,
| no interpreter.
|
| As for C wannabe, BASIC got famous before C had any
| meaningful meaning outside Bell Labs.
| musicale wrote:
| I think "C wannabe" is a complaint about some modern BASICs
| trying to be too much like C.
|
| Dartmouth BASIC and timesharing were remarkable
| achievements: a simplified version of Fortran that could be
| learned in an afternoon but could be used for a wide
| variety of programs, including games; a fast, interactive
| compiler; and efficient resource usage and multiplexing
| that enabled a single machine to be shared by dozens (?) of
| interactive users. BASIC was also simple enough that it
| could be implemented compactly and efficiently on 8-bit
| microcomputers, while retaining its ease of learning for
| beginners and non-experts. And you could still write/run
| games with it.
| pjmlp wrote:
| And could be used as systems programming language on 8
| and 16 bit home computers, long before C got famous
| outside UNIX, while being safer at it.
|
| So there is nothing like wanting to be like C, when its
| mainstream adoption predates C.
|
| Actually I am quite thankful to have learnt systems
| programming on 8 and 16 bit systems, with BASIC and
| Pascal variations, macro Assemblers, exactly long before
| C's mainstream adoption, because I am not tainted with
| the idea before C there was nothing else, as it
| eventually became a common myth.
| anthk wrote:
| I still see Forth far more advanced than Basic and C+Unix
| it's a bit meh. Being orthogonal with pipes it's cool,
| but Forth did that better since day 1 and without even a
| wordlist.
|
| On Pascal, good for DOS, and maybe the Classic Mac, but
| even under Unix there were really good underused
| platforms, like TCL/Tk +SQLite. More crude than VB, for
| sure; but, seriously, most of the time a quick tool in
| that language would cover the 90% of the needs of any
| corporation.
| bemmu wrote:
| I was in primary school when I heard about AmigaBasic. I was
| incredibly excited by it, I told my friend it would make it
| possible for us to build anything, for example we could build
| an ice hockey game. I hated ice hockey. I was just so excited
| that building anything at all with it seemed amazing.
|
| But it turned out it was basically unusable on a TV because of
| the narrow cursor and difficult to read font. But AMOS was
| great, and we built a simple one-room adventure game prototype
| on it.
| Narishma wrote:
| Are any of the games any good?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| The game of life is still being persuied relentlessly, the
| lunar module program was cooked by a NASA drop-out. Hamarabi is
| about to get cooked. Monopoly I do not think can be published.
| anthk wrote:
| Golf.bas it's almost a Neo Turf Masters game in text mode.
|
| Super Star Trek it's good too; and there are modern ports such
| as Super Star Trek from ESR in Python which expand the game a
| lot.
|
| Also, BSD users have installed the old one, written in C, at
| /usr/games/trek. man trek
| chasil wrote:
| I remember variants on this for several platforms by the authors:
|
| Don Inman, Ramon Zamora, Bob Albrecht.
|
| TRS-80: https://www.amazon.com/Advanced-TRS-80-Level-II-
| BASIC/dp/047...
|
| TI-99/4a: https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-TI-BASIC-
| TI-99-4A/dp/081...
|
| Visual basic for dos: https://www.amazon.com/Visual-MS-DOS-
| Prentice-Innovative-Tec...
|
| VIC-20: https://www.amazon.com/Vic-BASIC-User-Friendly-
| Guide/dp/0835...
|
| Here is the full TRS-80 text:
| https://archive.org/details/trs-80-level-ii-basic-a-self-tea...
|
| Who were these guys? They were all over the map.
| musicale wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Albrecht
|
| http://www.svipx.com/pcc/
| wduquette wrote:
| This exact book is how I learned to program, back in the late
| '70's. Lots of good memories.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| This is the book on how to write practical games. If DEC had
| not shafted Ahl, I would have been on real DEC instead of an
| HP.
|
| DEC could have ruled the world.
| MauryMarkowitz2 wrote:
| > DEC could have ruled the world
|
| No way.
|
| DEC's entire corporate structure was based on a particular
| business model that demanded their products sell for tens of
| thousands to hundreds of thousands per sale.
|
| They tried many times to break out of this box, but failed
| every time. There was simply too much of the company invested
| in selling into a particular size of customer, and its weight
| meant that they could not survive, for instance, selling
| individual small computers to end users.
|
| You can see this right to the end: even when they came out
| with Alpha it was targeted 100% to what was then the high-end
| of the new server-based market. Sure they made workstations,
| but only grudgingly, and with the hope that it would be part
| of a network containing at least one of their higher-end
| servers.
| wduquette wrote:
| Nah, this was the book on how to write programs in the
| dominant end-user language of the day. Few of the games are
| all that memorable, really; the coolness lay in making the
| computer do things, in building something that was
| interactive. The book appeared in a brief shining moment when
| literally anyone could write meaningful programs without
| requiring vast amounts of training---and then, like me and so
| many others, could grow and learn as the industry grew.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Walter Bright said here that he learned programming from this
| book.
| a_e_k wrote:
| I picked up my copy of the microcomputer version at a
| neighborhood rummage sale in a park as a young kid. It's one of
| the earliest things from my childhood that I still have. Good
| times.
| DigiEggz wrote:
| It's so entertaining to just pour through the source for each
| game and read the language used at the time, like in the game
| instructions or result responses.
|
| There's something refreshing about seeing things described in
| different ways than they are now. I always wonder if some long
| forgotten words of phrasings will make their way back into public
| consciousness.
| saneshark wrote:
| I don't see gorillas.bas -- that was my favorite. I actually
| found my appreciation for writing code modifying lines of code in
| that game to make bigger explosions.
| nurettin wrote:
| nibbles was my favorite. Reading the code as a 13 year old I
| learned that they doubled y resolution by using lower and upper
| square ascii characters. It inspired me to find creative
| solutions for problems.
| AnonHP wrote:
| I had fun changing the barrier wall sizes in nibbles to make
| some levels easier. Having the source accessible and easy to
| change was quite useful.
| shmerl wrote:
| No gorilla.bas?
| zkmon wrote:
| Looks like no Qbasic games? Nibbles, Gorilla - love to see them
| included.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Literally the first line of the README explains why:
|
| > This folder contains the programs found in the March 1975 3rd
| printing of David Ahl's 101 BASIC Computer Games, published by
| Digital Equipment Corp.
| TMWNN wrote:
| Among the most important computer books ever written, on the
| level of SICP and K&R.
|
| Walter Bright said here that he learned programming from this
| book.
| sudofoo wrote:
| Were line numbers in old BASIC games actually helpful, or just
| extra typing?
| femto wrote:
| They were required for most early BASIC interpreters. They
| acted as a label for goto statements and determined the
| listing/execution order. From memory, the TRS-80 (and similar)
| would immediately execute a statement without a line number,
| but would store a statement with a line number.
| a_e_k wrote:
| They were also how you edited your program in the absence of
| a coding editor. You'd type LIST to see your current program,
| type a new line with the same number to replace an existing
| line, or a new line with a new number to insert it
| numerically, etc.
| femto wrote:
| And it was an absolute pain if you had to insert a new
| statement, but didn't have enough space left between line
| numbers. You had to retype the offending lines with new
| line numbers.
| musicale wrote:
| Dartmouth BASIC had a renumber command. I believe that
| line renumbering commands and/or utilities were commonly
| available for microcomputer BASICs as well.
| femto wrote:
| Some BASICs had a RENUM command. They were a bit of a
| pain as well. As you wrote your program you got to know
| which line numbers were associated with which statements.
| Doing a RENUM meant having to relearn the "meaning" of
| each line number. I'm pretty sure my VZ-200 didn't have
| the RENUM command.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Sadly Atari BASIC did not.
|
| I can't recall if the Apple ][ BASIC had it built in, or
| if Beagle Brothers utility software could do it, but it
| was possible somehow.
| ahonhn wrote:
| Common practice was to increment line numbers by 10
| instead of 1. Would give a bit of wiggle room to add more
| lines in later without having to renumber everything
| else.
| musicale wrote:
| Dartmouth BASIC was designed for teletype-style, hard-copy
| printing terminals, rather than video displays.
| Conveniently your whole session was printed out, so you
| could take your email and program listing home with you.
| Line-by line editing was practical for printing terminals,
| and line-by-line I/O scaled well across multiple terminals
| on a timesharing system.
|
| Line editing also worked well on microcomputers with cursor
| movement (like the C64) - you could edit code in place just
| by overtyping and hitting "return" for the appropriate
| line.
|
| On a slightly unrelated note, teletypes date back to the
| 19th century telegraph (and typewriter) era.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teleprinter
| fifticon wrote:
| To elaborate on that: They were the handle on the code lines,
| for anything. You would often use the line number to either
| edit a given line number, or to remove it. 'Clever' people
| would even do mis-guided arithmetic on them, e.g.
| GOTO MenuChoiceNum\*100 + 1000 GOSUB
| MenuChoiceNum\*100 + 1000
| codr7 wrote:
| Wow, it hurts to imagine maintaining and evolving that code
| :)
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Fortran's had computed goto's since... at least '77
| version. Fun times, those.
| pklausler wrote:
| Fortran has never had a GOTO to a computed label number
| like this.
| jamalaramala wrote:
| They were essential for branching with GOTO and GOSUB.
|
| Example: 10 PRINT "HELLO "; 20 GOTO
| 10
|
| This would create an infinite loop that you could break with
| Ctrl+C.
|
| You could then type: 15 PRINT "WORLD ";
|
| And when you listed the source code (with the command LIST) you
| would see: 10 PRINT "HELLO "; 15
| PRINT "WORLD "; 20 GOTO 10
| BrenBarn wrote:
| The Dave Ahl books were one of my first introductions to
| programming. They're still awesome.
| musicale wrote:
| I wish modern computer companies to hire people to create
| material like this, the way DEC apparently did. Unfortunately
| computers aren't really programmed by end-users anymore.
| Arguably there's no need to between a million apps on one hand
| and AI on the other.
| musicale wrote:
| I'm greatly inspired by the kind of utopian visions of computing
| that seemed to be common from the BASIC era to the PC era to the
| pre-Facebook Internet era.
|
| I'm somewhat disenchanted with commercial computing from the
| social media and smartphone era to the modern AI era, even though
| it is impressive and technically interesting.
| anthk wrote:
| I would love this for Forth :)
|
| Yes, everyone had and has run these either on micros or
| bwbasic/blassic/bas, but porting these to Forth would be really
| cool.
| Erwin wrote:
| I found the backslash as separator of multiple statements on one
| line curious. I guess that's because I was used to BASIC on the
| Commodore C-64/128/Amiga and later the magical Amos Basic, so
| there were more differences in some of the other dialects.
| MauryMarkowitz2 wrote:
| I've been slowly documenting these differences with a series of
| Wiki articles. Generally though, there's three major
| "families":
|
| * The original Dartmouth BASIC turned into a wide variety of
| mainframe versions. These are marked by the use of the CHANGE
| statement and supporting the MAT statements. * HP's dialect had
| array-based strings (like C) and string slicing... LET
| A$[1,6]="HELLO. * Timeshare's SUPER BASIC, which turned into
| BASIC-PLUS, which turned into MS BASIC, lacked those features
| and instead used MID/LEFT/RIGHT.
|
| There's many other more minor changes from dialect to dialect,
| but those are the main differences.
| carrja99 wrote:
| Oh wow this is a trip down memory lane. My parents bought me a
| computer advertised in the classified ad as "includes over 100
| games" and that really meant it came with a book over 100+ games
| in basic. I'd stay up copying the book to play the games in it.
| Fun times.
| zombot wrote:
| Ha, `poet.bas` is the ancestor of all LLMs!
| 0xEF wrote:
| I also remember these books if anyone else was fond of them:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Adventure
|
| I have a few books from the Micro Adventures series and they can
| still be found on eBay for around $5 - $10 USD each, I think. Fun
| times, indeed!
| zabzonk wrote:
| Anyone recommend a good, ideally free QBASIC-like for modern
| Windows? Want native Windows, no DOSBox or similar.
|
| My little brother (60+yr old) wants to get back into programming
| after many years of business analysis, project management, yada
| yada, but he was originally a programmer. I suggested Python, but
| I think he might be happier with BASIC. He's retired now, so
| doesn't need/want to do it for a job.
| mysterydip wrote:
| Freebasic or QB64 would be good places to look. There's also VB
| equivalents like gambas or xojo.
| hhhAndrew wrote:
| Oh my, this is so amazing. I can't wipe the grin off my face. I
| never thought I was would see Hammurabi
| (https://github.com/maurymarkowitz/101-BASIC-Computer-Games/b...)
| again!
|
| With this I can pinpoint the exact first bug I created, and
| debugged. The year was 1991 +/- 1, the place was Canberra
| Australia. For unknown reasons that changed my life forever, my
| Dad got on board with this "computer" thing and bought an
| "Osborne" 486 PC. That year I went to the school fete and, for
| AUD 0.20, picked up a used copy of this book, leafed through the
| pages, settled on Hammurabi, and after some struggle and
| discussions with friends, managed to run Q-Basic and typed this
| program into it. And it sort of worked, but something was wrong,
| and after much experimentation I found that on line 11 (only
| today, with this post can, I finally state the true line number)
| I had written "LET P=P+1" instead of the correct "LET P=P+I".
| After a fair bit (days) of trial and error and 10-year-old
| reasoning, I figured that out, and so it began.
| sitkack wrote:
| A compatible Quick Basic system is available
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QB64
| PaulHoule wrote:
| They built a Route 93 bypass around Manchester, NH and a new
| mall in 1980, not long after that I bought a copy of "101 BASIC
| Computer Games" from the Digital [1] Store there (really!) This
| was the minicomputer edition that David Ahl had published when
| he worked at DEC, not the microcomputer edition that he
| produced at Creative Computing magazine.
|
| I was typing those programs into a TRS-80 Color Computer which
| had a very good implementation of Microsoft BASIC enhanced with
| commands to draw lines, circles and flood fills on a high
| resolution screen. The text mode only had 32 characters across,
| but you could get most programs to work on it.
|
| That generation of games was intended to be run on a
| teleprinter so they did not use any graphics other than drawing
| scenes with ASCII characters and didn't use any commands to
| write text at specific places on the screen. Later in the 1980s
| you saw books with more complex BASIC games that implemented
| shooters and Pac-Man clones and such but all of those were
| specific to a particular computer whereas Ahl's games were
| portable even though you'd often have to modify the programs a
| little to get them to work.
|
| By 1991 though I was done with BASIC. I had a ROM cartridge
| with an assembler by 1982 or so but I was still writing a lot
| of BASIC. Circa 1985 I was doing a lot with the OS-9 operating
| system which had a C compiler and BASIC09 which was
| particularly advanced, I remember writing a FORTH in 6809
| assembly. Circa 1987 I had a 286 PC which had a wide range of
| programming languages including various BASICs, but Turbo
| Pascal was my favorite, though I switched to C in college
| (where I was in '91) because C was portable to the 32-bit
| workstations they had.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation
| lioeters wrote:
| I had a similar early learning experience. Grew up on BASIC,
| LOGO, a bit of 8086 assembly, Turbo Pascal, C.
|
| Pretty sure these first few languages affected or shaped my
| childhood mental development somehow, for better or worse,
| and how I think about and express programs. Especially with
| BASIC, I was so young I was still learning how to think and
| talk in a _human_ language, along with how to think with and
| talk to a computer.
| coldpie wrote:
| The Retronauts podcast recently had an excellent episode about
| type-in computer games, and modern efforts to preserve them:
| https://retronauts.com/article/2367/retronauts-episode-677-t...
| kerv wrote:
| Thanks for sharing! This brings back so many memories. When I was
| 8 years old, my mother enrolled me in a programming summer camp
| at our local university. This was my first exposure to BASIC and
| that is what got me hooked. After that, writing BASIC programs on
| APPLE 2/2E throughout junior high and highschool was the thing to
| do. Switched to Visual Basic shortly after that... It started it
| all for me!
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Damn! I'm old. I remember the book.
| whartung wrote:
| I would love to know how DECs BASIC-PLUS worked.
|
| The key thing about B+ is that it's a compiled BASIC, it compiled
| into P-Code, that was then executed. This is in contrast to MS-
| BASIC which interpreted the parsed token stream over and over.
|
| But, there is no way that the entire thing was compiled each time
| you said "RUN", that would have been much to expensive. But, it
| was compiled. At the same time, it kept the entirety of the BASIC
| program in memory, as text. So, it had to store both the raw text
| form, and the compiled form. Seems quite expensive given the
| limits of machines back in the day.
|
| So, I've always been interested in the design and engineering
| history of B+.
|
| Similarly, I'd love to know where Gates and Allen got the idea to
| use a tokenized form to store the program, as its an elegant
| solution in a tight memory budget to store the program source and
| runtime.
|
| They're clever guys, and maybe they made it up out of whole
| cloth, but it would be interesting to know what may have inspired
| them to do it that way. It wasn't BASIC-PLUS, as that's not how
| it worked.
| jordiburgos wrote:
| Where is gorilla.bas?
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