The basics of BASIC, the programming language of the 1980s.

I was born too late 😢

a lot of that basic code seems similar to G code, I wonder if they are related.

Love all the great stories in the comments

Growing up, the siblings and I never got much further than the
10 PRINT “ insert insult with sibling name “
20 GOTO 10
RUN
And yes, the old ‘SYNTAX ERROR’

BASIC was my first love with computer. She was simple and easy to understand.
FORTRAN was my next acquaintance but I was not interested to make her be my lover.
Pascal was eventual the love of my life.
C, C++ could never swayed me over regardless how pretty or powerful they were.

Nice video

I learned Basic on an Apple III a very long time ago. No tape drive, but a 5 1/2 inch floppy disk.

I have a few questions however I'm currently very busy and will get back to this channel!! I have an old Tandy 1000 and I'm working on booting it up again as it was my first PC! I learned the basics of basic from just entering in programs from PC magazine... yes it's that simple if you spend the time and effort in and think in Logic or your Vulcan by nature!

I love it when you do Documentary series unfortunately when I was in school the first computer I used was a Macintosh Colour Classic it and we had to bus to a special lab too and one thing i love to do on that system was there Paint program and Oregon Trail after we do Typing I think it was Mario Typing I am not 100% sure I usuly try to draw the Enterprise-D or the Enterprise-A on it

BASIC - Pascal - Visual Basic - C - Prolog - COBOL - ADA - Perl - Tcl - JavaScript - Java - Python - Rust: I owe my coding journey to Basic. Thank you.

I peeked and poked my way through the 1980s.

Wow Tandy from RadioShack that was my 1st pc....

Kid from 06, bit in grade 7 my school still used Mathpower textbooks, which had basic in them.... The computers to run these are long gone (although i remember appleworks in the computer lab in grade 1)... I remember finding an emulator online and typing it into a chromebook... It would be cool if they did that now

Started mid-70s, as a 12 year old kid. TRS-80. 4K RAM, cassette drive.

I still remember the game “Pillbox”. It was a 2-player game where you lobbed mortar shells at each other. Almost set up like Pong - one guy on each side of the screen. You had to calculate the elevation and speed of the round and then let it fly! BOOM!

Graduated to an Apple 2e. 16K RAM (I think) plus an actual disk drive!

Then all the way to a PC clone. 286 with 640K and (hold on to your hats) a 20 meg HDD! No way they’d ever make a computer more powerful than that, right?! 😉

Oh, sorry, got to run…I’ve got to take this video meeting…on my watch! 🤣

Born in the late 70s , i did basic in the school, my first encounter with computers. Today i am something something but the fun is nowhere near to those days.

crap, i relize im old cus i coded in basic

I used to have all of those MicroAdventures books. Good times!

The glory of basic on these old machines imo is peek/poke/call. An interpreter on a system without a user mode or anything is very unique and awesome

When I was a teenager I made a decent basic game with like 1,000 lines of code...was large for its day. It had main menu, high scores, random block generator with player movement where you collect gold coins for score and a timer with spider looking thing that would get you when the timer ran out to end the game....shame I didnt keep it...

mr. murray, thank you for the video. although, i'm a bit surprised not to see an amstrad or a sinclair on the desk in front of you, as they are one of the few gems of the 8-bit era...

I wrote a BASIC compiler once, but I'm better now.

Interesting to see that Microsoft was absolutely dominating the software world from the start.

On Atari BASIC (probably other too) you could marry BASIC with machine code using the USR() command to help speed things up.

damn that math book looks familiar

Nostalgic..I wrote entire cricket program in basic and used to play with my brother

my first command was FORMAT applied to a floppy disc of the new CP/M 3.0 on commodore 128D

I always wanted to download an Old-School Basic interpreter but I have always been warned off of downloads that contain viruses and other ad-ware. Any ideas?

10 INPUT A$ 20 PRINT "HELLO "A$ 30 PAUSE 0 40 CLS 50 PRINT "THIS IS MY COMMENT, "A$

When my TV broke down, I wrote programs on my ZX Spectrum blindly. Of course the result could only be heard, so I wrote music programs for the beeper ;)

Programming Tetris in BASIC within an hour ? Really ?

I taught myself basic BASIC in middle school in the late '70s. In the early '80s I got an Atari 800 with Atari BASIC. Loved it but had some different ways of doing things.
Besides the manual, Compute books taught me alot. Used Atari for along time until I finally started with the PC. Still miss my Atari.

Lost interest after Microsoft came to picture.

boy that takes me back!

Coding in BASIC was just painful.

I used to write engineering calculations in basic. To speed up we used to compile the program.

Me: types in "basic programming language tutorial:
Every pyton tutorial that has basic in its name: hello

Is there still a way to use BASIC nowadays? Is there any software or emulator I could download?

Back in 1978 I learned Basic on a Honeywell 6000 machine. Input Keyboard was a TTY, to write and read data to floppy - 8"- ,you had to specify the track where to write or read. It was really fun.

I wish I had started doing basic on Qbasic, instead of the Spectrum and the Amstrad CPC's Basic and GWBasic on Pc... Having labels was so much more op.

My parents bought me a TRS-80 Model III for Christmas 1981 or 82 I think it was... I was only 12 and taught myself BASIC from the book that came with it, and by typing in games from magazines. So grateful to have had the experience.

I never understood how to save to cassette, so I ended up writing my code in paper first and then type it back whenever I wanted it to run :D

😂 I had no idea this book existed until now. I remember must have been 8 or 9 playing my commodore 16 yeah I know the darker coloured poor wee brother to the due to be released c64, I had scarletina a mild form of scarlet fever but it was contagious so I was confined to my room not allowed to see anyone except my mum who would bring me in soup etc.. well I had went through the games I had and was so utterly bored I picked up the c16 manual ( commodore gave really good manuals back in the day) and started learning basic, done a wee program that could select the colour and line thickness and use the arrow keys to draw on the screen, this was quickly ammended to using the joystick when I found out the joy command lol. I then. I wanted to make a chess programme but that was too complex at the moment so I started on a game of checkers.... And look what I see in your book a game of checkers..how many hours you could have saved me. Between the book, basic syntax and reverse engineering small programs. It taught me basic programming at a time even a few years later most teachers didn't know I think we had one maths teacher and a physics teacher who were in on the subject at the time.. thank goodness I never went down the coding route my eyes would be square by now ( according to my mother) 😂

I really miss my TK100 and TK2000.

As a boy in grade school, time didn’t matter while typing in BASIC programs that were listed in textbooks. I was excited to see if the program worked.

I enjoyed the Ghostbusters dogs and cats reference

One of the best modern versions of BASIC is Richard Russell's 'BBC Basic for Windows' (BB4W).. A much updated version of the original BBC BASIC used on the Acorn Model B and Master series of computers. It is easy to learn, has a lot of help included, and your programs can be compiled into stand alone '.exe' files.