7 ms·

QBasic was my first programming experience. Back in 2008 I bought a computer for 50 uruguayan pesos (around 2 dollars), Pentium MMX and 32MB of ram. It didn't

QBasic was my first programming experience. Back in 2008 I bought a computer for 50 uruguayan pesos (around 2 dollars), Pentium MMX and 32MB of ram. It didn't boot W98 because the hard drive was corrupted. It did load MsDOS and I found Qbasic using the help command. I didn't have internet so I used to go to the internet cafe with a floppy disk and download tons of tutorials in plain text to read with EDIT.EXE Now I've been working as a software developer for almost five years and love it, all thanks to QBasic and that old cheap computer.

taneq 9y ago
Likewise, my jump from the HP calculators' built in language was QBasic. And then, when it wasn't able to plot a Mandelbrot set fast enough (on a 486DX-33), I tried FastBASIC which was about 10x quicker - and that's how I learned the difference between compiled and interpreted languages.
andrewcarter 9y ago
Me too! I love QBasic so much - totally wouldn't be where I am today without it. I met a kid at summer camp when I was in middle school who told me he made his own games and fake computer viruses to scare his parents in Quick Basic. He mailed me a floppy disk with Quick Basic on it once we were home and I've been in love with programming ever since. It's was the perfect first language. It's so easy to play little sounds or draw graphics, and the environment is basically non-existent so setup is easy. So much fun!
- merolish 9y ago
  Very much agreed on the ease of graphics and sound, and its influence on me as a student -- I wrote a version of Pong in about 250 lines back in the 90s. A single line of music was as simple as PLAY and a string language to specify duration and pitch. SCREEN followed by LINE/CIRCLE/PAINT and you had graphics. GET and PUT gave you sprites. Some of the fine people on Prodigy provided their amateur games and tutorials. If there's a modern equivalent I'd be interested to know.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    QB64 basically is. From the article you can do everything Qbasic could, but also load PNGs (_LOADIMAGE), fonts (_LOADFONT) and MP3s (_SNDOPEN).
alyandon 9y ago
Showing my age a bit but it's amazing how such simple things can alter one's life. My parents brought home a heavily discounted TRS-80 Model I Level I with a whopping 4k of ram when I was a child and that started my life long love of technology/coding.
- cr0sh 9y ago
  I started programming in Microsoft BASIC on my first computer - a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K of RAM. I used a cassette tape drive for storage, and a television for my "monitor". That's where it all began. Upgrades were done (went to 64K of RAM, also got a floppy drive and printer - then later the Color Computer 3, which was upgraded to 512K, and the CM-8 monitor - oh, there was a 300 baud modem in there somewhere too). Amazingly, I still have all of my old machines, and they all work (except for my printer - it was the CGP-220 ink jet printer, and the heads are clogged completely, and no way to fix or get ink cartridges for it).
  - russellbeattie 9y ago
    Nice! Fellow old-timer here! I still have my original TRS-80 CoCo as well. A few years ago I wanted to extract my first programs and realized I could convert my tapes to .wav files and load them into an emulator on my Mac. This is the post I wrote about it (complete with source code): http://rb.io/blog/letter-defender-my-big-program-from-30-years-ago http://rb.io/blog/letter-defender-my-big-program-from-30-yea...
  - alyandon 9y ago
    I have fond memories of my CoCo and poke 65495,0.
xamuel 9y ago
For me it was GW-BASIC on a Tandy 1000 our family found next to the university dumpster. Kids these days with their fancy-schmancy dropdown menus!
- the_af 9y ago
  GW-BASIC too! Though in my case, running on a PC XT with an amber monochrome CRT. I remember doing graphics with GW-BASIC (on an Hercules videocard, I think you needed SIMCGA or something like it)... it was a bit like using the LOGO turtle, you had to go left, right, up and down. Compared to GW-BASIC, QuickBasic was a luxury :)
- orionblastar 9y ago
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/files/ PC Basic does what GW-Basic used to do. You can type old Basic games into it and they still work.
dljsjr 9y ago
QBasic was also my first exposure to programming! When I was about 11 or 12 years old my best friend and I decided we wanted to make video games when we grew up so we needed to know how to program. His dad bought him a "for dummies" book, which just so happened to be QBasic for Dummies, and covered how to load the QBasic environment off the Win95 install CD and, well, how to write programs. We both made it about half way through that book before we'd finished middle school. I don't make video games but I am in software. He went on to attend Digipen (back when it was still directly affiliated with Nintendo) and he now works in the games industry in Washington State.
thearn4 9y ago
Same! It came free with my dad's 386 that he bought for work back in 1991 or 1992. He didn't have any interest in it so I read through the manual and tinkered with it.
ashleyn 9y ago
Qbasic is something that simply has no modern-day parallel. It started very simple, PRINT and GOTO were enough to get you started. It had the tools to expand along as you learned, and a great community of amateurs who would make cool games with it. Eventually, you'd grow out of it and try your hand at C, because by that point you were encouraged to learn so much (and with a gentle curve) that you exhausted its capabilities. It was an excellent educational tool, an excellent way to get kids "hooked" into "real programming". Learning programming today isn't quite as simple as it was with Qbasic. It involves setting up a large toolchain, and for a beginner, the experience is daunting as the language community reviled both anything imperative and unstructured. There's no easy way to do anything other than text from the command line, which makes for some thoroughly uninteresting demos and examples. Qbasic wrapped an IDE and graphics library around the language in an all-in-one solution; it was so cool seeing colourful, pseudo-graphical demos like Nibbles or Gorillas. If a beginner wanted to do anything "cool-looking" today, this same beginner programmer would need to set up render to texture on an OpenGL surface. Yuck! And so they lose interest, believing programming is the mysterious and complex domain of gods. This market did not go away. I don't quite think QB64 fills it, being little more than a nostalgic, artistic homage to Qbasic. If someone were to design a programming language with a learning curve as gentle as Qbasic, and wrap a simple IDE and graphics library around it, all while modernising some of its more dubious qualities...you'd have a real shot at recapturing the magic for a new generation of young programmers.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  I found myself reminded of Blitz Basic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC Seems it has since been open sourced.
  - fuball63 9y ago
    I immediately thought of Blitz Basic too, which is how I got started programming. They recently took down the website for it, which made me sad, as I used to frequent the forum a lot.
- paulasmuth 9y ago
dspillett 9y ago
I cut my programming teeth in BBC Basic, which was a much better language than that found on many other 8-bit micros of the time. No silly 2-character variable names limit (IIRC it respected up to 40 characters), proper named procedures and functions so you could program with some structure (some 9-bits BASICs' had little more than GOTO <line> and GOSUB <line>, with BBC Basic and very little jiggery-pokery you could program without line numbers at all), and a built-in multi-pass assembler (which I played with for various tricks like sprites and a bit of playing with integer fractal calculations for trippy graphics). I used QuickBasic later (QBasic was essentially QuickBasic without the compiler and a few other features cut out) and many other things since.
- jcadam 9y ago
  Amiga AMOS was my favorite "BASIC." They even sold an optional compiler :) By the time we got a PC, Visual Basic was a thing. It just wasn't the same anymore :( Motivated me to move on to C.
  - kerng 9y ago
    Oh AMOS- thanks for the reminder. I had totally forgotten about it. It was really incredible for game development. I remember working on a Mario jump and run clone for a while to learn game development. It was a really great environment.
- sshagent 9y ago
  This was pretty much my route too. BBC Basic (Albeit on an Acorn Electron). Whilst my friends we're rocking the much "cooler" Spectrums, i didn't have people to swap games with so got my interest in programming there. Is interesting how parents decisions to buy the "wrong" computer got me started in the right direction.
  - vram22 9y ago
    The BBC computer with BBC BASIC was good. I used it some; I didn't have one, I used the one in the British Library in Chennai (Madras), from where I also got tons of good computer books to read, over some years while in college. (I used to max out the four-book allowance and borrow that many at a time to take home to read :) Apart from supporting just BASIC programs, it had the feature of allowing you to drop down to inline 6502 assembly language, just by including all the assembly language statements between square brackets, one statement per line. I also used a few other micros like the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC Jr. for a while. Here is one post I wrote about it: Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.: https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html
mholmes680 9y ago
wahoo! I still have top fighting game (admittedly, this list is probably from 1998): http://nordman.tripod.com/qgames.html http://nordman.tripod.com/qgames.html :) I miss the community that was the QBASIC Prodigy BBS groups. I spent hours trying to design better games and utilites, only to be outdone by a random stranger. We'd have to first make the games, then invent new compression techniques to get the big ones posted to the board, and i think someone even had a splitter/combinator thing to put the encryption back together over multiple posts. I also miss the ABC Code Packs (memories: http://www.manmrk.net/tutorials/basic/abc/ http://www.manmrk.net/tutorials/basic/abc/).
woliveirajr 9y ago
In Basic (not exactly QuickBasic, since MSX computers came with MSX Basic) I learnt how to program. And when I was able to alter some Inventory control for an uncle that owned a drugstore, it was great. The computer wasn't exactly cheap, but seeing it be used for professional needs when only big companies would have computers was amazing.
teilo 9y ago
QBasic and QuickBasic are related, but not the same. QuickBasic was compiled to an EXE. QBasic was only interpreted. I never used QBasic, but I used QuickBasic extensively and remember when v.4.5 came out. I still have my QuickBasic manual, which I just can't allow myself to throw out.
- deckard1 9y ago
  As someone that loved QuickBASIC, it irks me when people confuse it with QBasic. QBasic was Microsoft's answer to "what should we do with GW-BASIC to make it feel fresh again?" Whereas QuickBASIC was a serious tool.
craftandhustle 9y ago
Similar. Except, I won a pentium (286?) machine running windows 3.11 in 1998 as a 13 year old from a top hat raffle (yes, a magician's type top hat). True story. It had a flavor of BASIC (I don't remember which) and accompanying manual which changed my life. Now, as a 30 year old Creative Director in the "new media" field, I hope there are similar parallels for the "youth", especially within the rural regions of where I grew up. If anyone has the capacity and wish to assist, a long term goal of mine has always been to provide a space for adolescents from similar backgrounds to explore these notions through the lens of Computer Science and Art.
- ido 9y ago
  pentium (286?) What is the question here exactly, if a pentium is the same as a 286? They are vastly different processors with 3 generations between them and easily a ~100x typical performance difference.

taneq 9y ago

Likewise, my jump from the HP calculators' built in language was QBasic. And then, when it wasn't able to plot a Mandelbrot set fast enough (on a 486DX-33), I tried FastBASIC which was about 10x quicker - and that's how I learned the difference between compiled and interpreted languages.

andrewcarter 9y ago

Me too! I love QBasic so much - totally wouldn't be where I am today without it. I met a kid at summer camp when I was in middle school who told me he made his own games and fake computer viruses to scare his parents in Quick Basic. He mailed me a floppy disk with Quick Basic on it once we were home and I've been in love with programming ever since. It's was the perfect first language. It's so easy to play little sounds or draw graphics, and the environment is basically non-existent so setup is easy. So much fun!

merolish 9y ago
Very much agreed on the ease of graphics and sound, and its influence on me as a student -- I wrote a version of Pong in about 250 lines back in the 90s. A single line of music was as simple as PLAY and a string language to specify duration and pitch. SCREEN followed by LINE/CIRCLE/PAINT and you had graphics. GET and PUT gave you sprites. Some of the fine people on Prodigy provided their amateur games and tutorials. If there's a modern equivalent I'd be interested to know.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  QB64 basically is. From the article you can do everything Qbasic could, but also load PNGs (_LOADIMAGE), fonts (_LOADFONT) and MP3s (_SNDOPEN).

alyandon 9y ago

Showing my age a bit but it's amazing how such simple things can alter one's life. My parents brought home a heavily discounted TRS-80 Model I Level I with a whopping 4k of ram when I was a child and that started my life long love of technology/coding.

cr0sh 9y ago
I started programming in Microsoft BASIC on my first computer - a TRS-80 Color Computer 2 with 16K of RAM. I used a cassette tape drive for storage, and a television for my "monitor". That's where it all began. Upgrades were done (went to 64K of RAM, also got a floppy drive and printer - then later the Color Computer 3, which was upgraded to 512K, and the CM-8 monitor - oh, there was a 300 baud modem in there somewhere too). Amazingly, I still have all of my old machines, and they all work (except for my printer - it was the CGP-220 ink jet printer, and the heads are clogged completely, and no way to fix or get ink cartridges for it).
- russellbeattie 9y ago
  Nice! Fellow old-timer here! I still have my original TRS-80 CoCo as well. A few years ago I wanted to extract my first programs and realized I could convert my tapes to .wav files and load them into an emulator on my Mac. This is the post I wrote about it (complete with source code): http://rb.io/blog/letter-defender-my-big-program-from-30-years-ago http://rb.io/blog/letter-defender-my-big-program-from-30-yea...
- alyandon 9y ago
  I have fond memories of my CoCo and poke 65495,0.

xamuel 9y ago

For me it was GW-BASIC on a Tandy 1000 our family found next to the university dumpster. Kids these days with their fancy-schmancy dropdown menus!

the_af 9y ago
GW-BASIC too! Though in my case, running on a PC XT with an amber monochrome CRT. I remember doing graphics with GW-BASIC (on an Hercules videocard, I think you needed SIMCGA or something like it)... it was a bit like using the LOGO turtle, you had to go left, right, up and down. Compared to GW-BASIC, QuickBasic was a luxury :)
orionblastar 9y ago
https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/files/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/pcbasic/files/ PC Basic does what GW-Basic used to do. You can type old Basic games into it and they still work.

dljsjr 9y ago

QBasic was also my first exposure to programming! When I was about 11 or 12 years old my best friend and I decided we wanted to make video games when we grew up so we needed to know how to program. His dad bought him a "for dummies" book, which just so happened to be QBasic for Dummies, and covered how to load the QBasic environment off the Win95 install CD and, well, how to write programs. We both made it about half way through that book before we'd finished middle school. I don't make video games but I am in software. He went on to attend Digipen (back when it was still directly affiliated with Nintendo) and he now works in the games industry in Washington State.

thearn4 9y ago

Same! It came free with my dad's 386 that he bought for work back in 1991 or 1992. He didn't have any interest in it so I read through the manual and tinkered with it.

ashleyn 9y ago

Qbasic is something that simply has no modern-day parallel. It started very simple, PRINT and GOTO were enough to get you started. It had the tools to expand along as you learned, and a great community of amateurs who would make cool games with it. Eventually, you'd grow out of it and try your hand at C, because by that point you were encouraged to learn so much (and with a gentle curve) that you exhausted its capabilities. It was an excellent educational tool, an excellent way to get kids "hooked" into "real programming". Learning programming today isn't quite as simple as it was with Qbasic. It involves setting up a large toolchain, and for a beginner, the experience is daunting as the language community reviled both anything imperative and unstructured. There's no easy way to do anything other than text from the command line, which makes for some thoroughly uninteresting demos and examples. Qbasic wrapped an IDE and graphics library around the language in an all-in-one solution; it was so cool seeing colourful, pseudo-graphical demos like Nibbles or Gorillas. If a beginner wanted to do anything "cool-looking" today, this same beginner programmer would need to set up render to texture on an OpenGL surface. Yuck! And so they lose interest, believing programming is the mysterious and complex domain of gods. This market did not go away. I don't quite think QB64 fills it, being little more than a nostalgic, artistic homage to Qbasic. If someone were to design a programming language with a learning curve as gentle as Qbasic, and wrap a simple IDE and graphics library around it, all while modernising some of its more dubious qualities...you'd have a real shot at recapturing the magic for a new generation of young programmers.

digi_owl 9y ago
I found myself reminded of Blitz Basic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitz_BASIC Seems it has since been open sourced.
- fuball63 9y ago
  I immediately thought of Blitz Basic too, which is how I got started programming. They recently took down the website for it, which made me sad, as I used to frequent the forum a lot.
paulasmuth 9y ago

dspillett 9y ago

I cut my programming teeth in BBC Basic, which was a much better language than that found on many other 8-bit micros of the time. No silly 2-character variable names limit (IIRC it respected up to 40 characters), proper named procedures and functions so you could program with some structure (some 9-bits BASICs' had little more than GOTO <line> and GOSUB <line>, with BBC Basic and very little jiggery-pokery you could program without line numbers at all), and a built-in multi-pass assembler (which I played with for various tricks like sprites and a bit of playing with integer fractal calculations for trippy graphics). I used QuickBasic later (QBasic was essentially QuickBasic without the compiler and a few other features cut out) and many other things since.

jcadam 9y ago
Amiga AMOS was my favorite "BASIC." They even sold an optional compiler :) By the time we got a PC, Visual Basic was a thing. It just wasn't the same anymore :( Motivated me to move on to C.
- kerng 9y ago
  Oh AMOS- thanks for the reminder. I had totally forgotten about it. It was really incredible for game development. I remember working on a Mario jump and run clone for a while to learn game development. It was a really great environment.
sshagent 9y ago
This was pretty much my route too. BBC Basic (Albeit on an Acorn Electron). Whilst my friends we're rocking the much "cooler" Spectrums, i didn't have people to swap games with so got my interest in programming there. Is interesting how parents decisions to buy the "wrong" computer got me started in the right direction.
- vram22 9y ago
  The BBC computer with BBC BASIC was good. I used it some; I didn't have one, I used the one in the British Library in Chennai (Madras), from where I also got tons of good computer books to read, over some years while in college. (I used to max out the four-book allowance and borrow that many at a time to take home to read :) Apart from supporting just BASIC programs, it had the feature of allowing you to drop down to inline 6502 assembly language, just by including all the assembly language statements between square brackets, one statement per line. I also used a few other micros like the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC Jr. for a while. Here is one post I wrote about it: Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.: https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html

mholmes680 9y ago

wahoo! I still have top fighting game (admittedly, this list is probably from 1998): http://nordman.tripod.com/qgames.html http://nordman.tripod.com/qgames.html :) I miss the community that was the QBASIC Prodigy BBS groups. I spent hours trying to design better games and utilites, only to be outdone by a random stranger. We'd have to first make the games, then invent new compression techniques to get the big ones posted to the board, and i think someone even had a splitter/combinator thing to put the encryption back together over multiple posts. I also miss the ABC Code Packs (memories: http://www.manmrk.net/tutorials/basic/abc/ http://www.manmrk.net/tutorials/basic/abc/).

woliveirajr 9y ago

In Basic (not exactly QuickBasic, since MSX computers came with MSX Basic) I learnt how to program. And when I was able to alter some Inventory control for an uncle that owned a drugstore, it was great. The computer wasn't exactly cheap, but seeing it be used for professional needs when only big companies would have computers was amazing.

teilo 9y ago

QBasic and QuickBasic are related, but not the same. QuickBasic was compiled to an EXE. QBasic was only interpreted. I never used QBasic, but I used QuickBasic extensively and remember when v.4.5 came out. I still have my QuickBasic manual, which I just can't allow myself to throw out.

deckard1 9y ago
As someone that loved QuickBASIC, it irks me when people confuse it with QBasic. QBasic was Microsoft's answer to "what should we do with GW-BASIC to make it feel fresh again?" Whereas QuickBASIC was a serious tool.

craftandhustle 9y ago

Similar. Except, I won a pentium (286?) machine running windows 3.11 in 1998 as a 13 year old from a top hat raffle (yes, a magician's type top hat). True story. It had a flavor of BASIC (I don't remember which) and accompanying manual which changed my life. Now, as a 30 year old Creative Director in the "new media" field, I hope there are similar parallels for the "youth", especially within the rural regions of where I grew up. If anyone has the capacity and wish to assist, a long term goal of mine has always been to provide a space for adolescents from similar backgrounds to explore these notions through the lens of Computer Science and Art.

ido 9y ago
pentium (286?) What is the question here exactly, if a pentium is the same as a 286? They are vastly different processors with 3 generations between them and easily a ~100x typical performance difference.