4 ms·

It’s interesting that QBasic was thought of as a beginners or gaming language In the early 90s, I worked on a bond trading floor in London, and we used QBasic

by craz8 7y ago

It’s interesting that QBasic was thought of as a beginners or gaming language In the early 90s, I worked on a bond trading floor in London, and we used QBasic for production systems. It was quite fun to work with, and pretty powerful with the right libraries. This was all in Dos as it was before Windows 3 was released, and getting everything to work in 640k was fun (I recall there was a system to page in and out different parts of the app, but my memory may be faulty on this part)

ashleyn 7y ago
Part of the appeal Qbasic had to me as a kid, was that I read that it was occasionally used in a professional capacity. So this easy-to-learn, easy-to-use language had the added cool-factor of being "real stuff". I don't think something like Gamemaker or Scratch would've had the same appeal - they'd just feel like baby's toys to me, whereas with something like Qbasic you knew you were actually doing "real" programming.
- craz8 7y ago
  It was certainly real stuff - less than 5 years later I was part of the team that shipped Windows 95 (but I was a C programmer before QuickBasic, so that helped)
h2odragon 7y ago
The QB 4.5 / PDS 7.1 compilers (linked on that site) were actually decent. Coupled with some of the ASM libraries available at the time there were crazy possibilities. I had a background/TSR file transfer utility in 1989(?) written in QB 4.5 and assembler for the fun stuff. (Never commercialized, the boss said "the computer still has to be on to receive things? that's useless") There were numerous vertical market applications developed in QB/ PDS; things we'd call CRM today all the way to "estimate how many passes this scraper will take to build an earth dam of this size and shape" tools. Microsoft forsaking that toolchain in favor of Windows / Visual Basic put a lot of those shops out of business.
redisman 7y ago
It had a very accessible core graphics API which was (and still is) really rare.

by craz8 7y ago

ashleyn 7y ago

Part of the appeal Qbasic had to me as a kid, was that I read that it was occasionally used in a professional capacity. So this easy-to-learn, easy-to-use language had the added cool-factor of being "real stuff". I don't think something like Gamemaker or Scratch would've had the same appeal - they'd just feel like baby's toys to me, whereas with something like Qbasic you knew you were actually doing "real" programming.

craz8 7y ago
It was certainly real stuff - less than 5 years later I was part of the team that shipped Windows 95 (but I was a C programmer before QuickBasic, so that helped)

h2odragon 7y ago

The QB 4.5 / PDS 7.1 compilers (linked on that site) were actually decent. Coupled with some of the ASM libraries available at the time there were crazy possibilities. I had a background/TSR file transfer utility in 1989(?) written in QB 4.5 and assembler for the fun stuff. (Never commercialized, the boss said "the computer still has to be on to receive things? that's useless") There were numerous vertical market applications developed in QB/ PDS; things we'd call CRM today all the way to "estimate how many passes this scraper will take to build an earth dam of this size and shape" tools. Microsoft forsaking that toolchain in favor of Windows / Visual Basic put a lot of those shops out of business.

redisman 7y ago

It had a very accessible core graphics API which was (and still is) really rare.