What computer did you learn to program BASIC language on?

[Bruce Tomlin]

I got a TRS-80 Level II 16K (they didn't call them "model" anything back then) in 1979 for my birthday. This was back when there was a six month wait, and my mom had gotten lucky by finding a store which had gotten one mis-shipped to them. It took me an hour to figure how to get it started up, because it was not obvious that the answer to the "Memory Size?" question was to just hit enter. (I had only encountered Level I machines before this.)

 

The cool part is that I was messing with assembly language in less than a year, thanks to a trip to San Antonio (we moved the following summer) and finding a real computer store in the yellow pages. I got a Z-80 programming card and it was straight up from there. Disassembling the BASIC taught me a lot of good assembly programming, since the code was pretty much written by Bill Gates himself.

 

In 1983 or so I bought a 4K CoCo (upgraded almost immediately to 64K back when 64K cost about $80) just so I could write 6809 code. Then I got a Mac in early 1985 (being one of the first "Switchers") and did a LOT of 68000 assembly language.

Edited February 2, 2007 by Bruce Tomlin

[liveinabin]

I gotta score one more for the ZX-81. I'm pleasantly surprised there are so many people around the world who had one. 'Uncle Clive' Sinclair would be proud.

[Red 5]

We had a TI-99/4a.

 

I used to write text adventures for my little brother.

All saved on cassette tape of course.

 

I would kill to be able to find those tapes and see what I wrote when I was 13.

[liveinabin]

I remember I wrote an animated adventure 'movie' with little user defined graphics and a load of BASIC for-next loops for motion (on the Spectrum). It ran to about..oh..1000 lines.

Problem was, every time I saved it, I wrote over the previous copy.

So, of course, came that fateful day when that 5 minutes of C60 tape just wore out.

 

I lost EVERYTHING and cried my heart out.

[glitch]

I started programming in Basic on a Bally Astrocade (still the most fun IMHO) then moved on to an Atari 800. Wrote quite a few games & programs on both. In my high school computer classes we had Commodore Pets & TRS-80 Model IIs. My last year of high school they replaced all the Pets & TRS-80s w/ Vic-20s & a single C64. The TRS-80s went to the Jr. High. I have no idea of what ever happened to the Pets. In college I didn't have any classes for Basic (Pascal, Fortran, COBOL, 8088 Assembler, etc but no Basic) but we did pick up an Atari ST which I did a little programing for using GFX (gfa?) Basic. I didn't get back into basic programming until my company started developing software for windows where we primarily use Visual Basic (VB.NET now) which is a different beast from the Tiny Basic on the Bally.

 

I still have quite a few of the Bally & Atari programs which are interesting to look at sometimes. Some of it is laughable but there are also spots where I have to go "I wrote that when?" especially where memory saving tricks come into play. With current Window PCs we don't worry too much about memory limitations anymore. There is a lot of bloated code for this reason. Some of the programs have some fairly complex coding that I cannot recognize what it is or why I did it, but it looks impressive

Edited February 2, 2007 by glitch

[Gabriel]

I remember I wrote an animated adventure 'movie' with little user defined graphics and a load of BASIC for-next loops for motion (on the Spectrum). It ran to about..oh..1000 lines.

Problem was, every time I saved it, I wrote over the previous copy.

So, of course, came that fateful day when that 5 minutes of C60 tape just wore out.

 

I lost EVERYTHING and cried my heart out.

 

My first big program was a Star Trek game. The player played the Enterprise, and the CPU played the Reliant. The setting was that Khan had done his first pass against the Enterprise and disabled her shields. The Enterprise was pretty tough, while the Reliant was fairly flimsy, but the Reliant's shields gave that ship one advantage. The other advantage was that the Reliant did things randomly. The CPU Khan would fire phasers, or photorps, or sometimes just sit there. The higher the level, the more likely it was that CPU Khan would do something effective.

 

Your controls for the Enterprise were to fire phasers, charge photons, fire photons, or attempt to guess Reliant's prefix code. Guessing the code made Reliant's shields drop and gave the Enterprise the advantage. Phasers were the most reliable weapons, but didn't do much damage. Photons did a lot of damage, but needed to be charged up before firing and often missed.

 

If you destroyed the Reliant, the game would reset and put you in the battle again with a higher difficulty. If the Reliant destroyed the Enterprise, the game ended and showed your score. I don't remember the scoring system. I remember I gave a bonus for destroying the Reliant without using the prefix code.

 

I planned out this game on notebook paper and wrote out all the code for it before ever typing it into my Vic. I think it was about 300 lines or so. I used a line increment of 1 (because I was young and foolish), and there were lots of multi-instruction lines. I didn't understand structured programming or Gosubs at the time, so there was a lot of Goto and spaghetti code. I remember showing it to a friend of mine at the time, and when he read the program he flat out told me that he didn't think it would work.

 

But, I typed it in, and it did work. There was barely enough memory in the Vic to hold the program and run it. The neat thing is my game became popular among my circle of friends. They liked loading it up and playing it, and they also developed an interest in modifying it.

 

We ported the game to every computer we had access to at the time. It spawned a C64, C16, TI-994A, Apple IIc, and TRS-80 Model 2 versions. I liked the C64 version best because I had added options to make the prefix code easier or more difficult to guess, and I had spent a lot of time making cool sound effects. The C16 had some sound too, as well as a "cheat mode" added by the owner of that computer. The TI-994A version had custom graphics that never did anything, and I think it had sound too. The Apple IIc version never progressed very far, and didn't have much to it other than the original game, and the TRS-80 version was the same way.

 

I probably should reprogram it in QBasic, just for kicks.

[liveinabin]

That sounds awesome! I have a C64 emu here and I'd love to run that!

[Inky]

Apple IIe, althought I did most of my basic in the ADAM's SmartBASIC

[deathtrappomegranate]

I learned BASIC on a terminal connected to a mainframe by a 110 baud "acoustic data coupler" (or modem, to close friends). No graphics, just text. The only sound was a plaintive <CTRL-G>.

 

If you pressed escape or break while an error message was being displayed, the connection would just hang.

 

Those were the days.

[RJ]

Atari 800XL, but my extent of learning was learning the basics (HA!) from typing in COMPUTE! & Antic program listings.

 

[Student Driver]

I gotta score one more for the ZX-81. I'm pleasantly surprised there are so many people around the world who had one. 'Uncle Clive' Sinclair would be proud.

 

Another one to make Sir Sinclair proud:

 

My mathematics professor this semester, Michal Misiurewicz, is a reknowned mathematician (he's the namesake of Misiurewicz points in the study of Julia and Mandlebrot sets). He apparently began his study of such sets by programming a Sinclair ZX-81-- and if anyone here has ever waited hours for a modern computer to chug through the calculations for such a set, I'm sure they can marvel at the research he eked out of his ZX...

[Pengwin]

I started out on a ZX Spectrum. I then moved on to an Oric Atmos, followed by my trusty 800XL. I still program on all three today.

 

IMHO Sinclair Basic was the best of the three, however, the A8 was the more versatile if you were willing to put in the effort..

[liveinabin]

My mathematics professor this semester, Michal Misiurewicz, is a reknowned mathematician (he's the namesake of Misiurewicz points in the study of Julia and Mandlebrot sets). He apparently began his study of such sets by programming a Sinclair ZX-81-- and if anyone here has ever waited hours for a modern computer to chug through the calculations for such a set, I'm sure they can marvel at the research he eked out of his ZX...

 

Oh my sainted aunt! Fractal calculations on a ZX81?!?!??!!!?!

 

It took long enough to write 10 PRINT "hello" 20 GOTO 10

[Video]

For me it would have been the Commodore C=64. I never did learn graphics, but I could do those simple guess the number games and edit the number of guesses, range of numbers/words etc.

 

I remember when i first got into programming in School, oh GOD, we had to use some kinda weird program (turtle?) to make the computer draw shapes, and damn, it was painfully slow, but fun to make it draw a circle bigger than the screen and it wouold go off one edge and come on another. It was realy simple to draw shapes, but never could attache them to anything.

 

Anyhow, I've pretty much forgotten how to do everything, but I'm thinking of trying to get back into the C64, and maybe try to get some graphics stuff.

[BydoEmpire]

Apple ][+ originally. My mom worked in the computer lab of the local community college, and I had to go to worth with here a few days when I was little and she couldn't find a sitter. My older brother showed me a few simple things. Once I was in junior high I really started programming, and did a bunch of games for the Apple 2 series - arcade games (yay for shape tables), adventure games, text RPGs, I even made a Mac-inspired icon-based interface that let you move the cursor via joystick and launch a bunch of preset apps. I'd skip lunch hour to go to the computer lab and work on games. I still have the disks, but none of them are readable. I also did few things on the c64, but not nearly as much as for the Apple.

 

I remember when i first got into programming in School, oh GOD, we had to use some kinda weird program (turtle?)

Yikes, yeah, that would be LOGO. My elementary school had some class that used that, too.

[Krytol]

CoCo II.

[Murph74]

Apple IIe at school, but Coleco SmartBASIC at home. I still remember the hours as a schoolkid (4-6th grade) with Family Computing, and I think it was K-Byte magazine's christmas catalog sized programming book. Kinda like a receipe book for Basic. Was kinda fun, even then I think, to 'port' the programs to the Adam. I remeber the disappointment when I couldn't get my Coleco joysticks (digital) to work on the Apple IIe (analog)... nor the Adam discs once I finally got a disk drive second hand (Thanks Mark Kilo! lol Never know when someone's gonna google their own name. ) to read on the Apple drives.

 

We had to spend a few weeks at least between about 6 of us trying to get Adam and Apple software btween systems... At the ripe age of 10 I couldn't quite figure out why we couldn't get Dragon's Lair to play as is on the Apple, or Oregon Trail to play on the Adam. :/ After all, Adam's SmartBasic was Applesoft compatible! Talk about a disappointing resolution...

 

Murph

[Rob Mitchell]

Data General minicomputer in 1977. The thing was the size a of a closet and heated the room. Featured swome wirewrapped technology. BASIC on one video terminal and a bunch of teletype machines. Magic!

 

Then there was Fortran (WATFOR) in 1980 via punchcards.

 

I continued BASIC on the Atari 800 in 1981.

 

Rob Mitchell

[uronw]

OK i'm new here. My first post. I learned on a ti994a. I was 34 in 1984, and that was the first any of us got to use any type of computer, right? I remember it being a blast tho. especially writing my own

small games. and a couple other things. Just today i purchased a ti 994a and some other stuff from that eba place I am looking forward to reigniting the thrill i had back then. I don't know if my wife agrees.

[Rex Dart]

Apple ][, one of those green-screen units, Jr. High.

 

 

In junior high me and my friend used to go to Radio Shack and we would type a program that had about a 2 minute delay, and then it would make a loud buzzing sound. We would turn the volume all the way up and run the program. We would exit the store a couple a minutes before it went off, and then watch the noisey destruction from across the way!

 

I did that too! Would go to wal-mart service merchandise or wherever, type up a delayed noise program, and let 'er rip. I was pretty rotten.

[0078265317]

I tried some programming in highschool in 1991 or 1992. Wasn't my thing. I don't remember the machine I used. But they were not very advanced then. Was probably a apple II or IIe. Something like that. The library had both macintosh and some 386 or 486 pcs I don't remember. The room I was in had macintosh IIsi I think. Before that it was pc I think. I think typing class was also apple II or IIe with that horrible pea soup green screen. No wonder I got a D.

[RickR]

Commodore PET.

[Reaperman]

Atari 800xl...embarassingly enough, it was earlier this year.

 

When I was a kid, I thought was a basic whiz, but I wasn't. I was terrible at it. I could print stuff to the screen, and handle simple logic, but I never really grasped looping, input control, graphics or sound--everything required for a 'game.'

 

This year I took a week off of work for Mardi Gras, sat down, and figured all that stuff out to some degree. I ended up doing decently well.

I've still got a lot of room for improvement, for example using PMG's, but for a week of trying, I did okay. My 10-year old brain just wasn't really up to the task, and even if it was, the accessibility of all the documentation in modern times really helped out.

[Greg2600]

They taught us some really rudimentary stuff on an Apple II/C when I was in elementary school, late 80's. I had a "full" course in BASIC as a high school freshman in 1993, and yes they still had the dreaded Apple II's. I found BASIC to be a complete waste, and totally worthless to my introductory into comp-sci programming in college a few years later. I so wish they'd used PASCAL or something closer to object-oriented instead of BASIC.

[BydoEmpire]

Love all the variety.

Edited November 21, 2014 by BydoEmpire