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This is simply not true. The Basic compiler on DEC PDP’s had Function and Sub and modules you could swap in and out of memory as needed. PDP usage was huge in
by ChicagoDave 4y ago
This is simply not true.
The Basic compiler on DEC PDP’s had Function and Sub and modules you could swap in and out of memory as needed. PDP usage was huge in the 80’s. And Microsoft BASIC 7.1 was a full native compiler with the same language syntax.
The line number versions of BASIC were used for amateur code, but professional systems had full procedural syntax.
- teddyh 4y agoNormal people, which are the subject of the article, did not have DEC PDPs. Did any commonly used home computers of the time have Microsoft Basic 7.1?
- ChicagoDave 4y agoThere were far more people writing code on PDP's in companies than people writing BASIC on PC's at home in the 80's. You may not have known about it, but almost every college had one and there were hundreds of thousands of businesses that ran on PDP BASIC.
- teddyh 4y agoThose people are not what the article is about, though. The article is about kids, encountering Basic at home.
- mysterydip 4y agoI know the article is about 80s BASICs, but QBASIC, first available in 91 and included free in MS-DOS 5.0 and higher, had named functions and subroutines.
- teddyh 4y agoYes, and? Almost all later Basic implementations has those. As I wrote, even some 1980’s Basic implementations had them. But those were not the Basic implementations used by people who owned the popular home computers in the 1980s. And, as a result, it is not what people commonly think of as “Basic”. I feel I am repeating myself here.
- themadturk 4y agoPeople of a certain age came to computing via machines from Apple, Commodore, Radio Shack, Atari, Sinclair, Acorn and others in the late 1970s and into the 1980s. These people -- what we might call the first digital generation -- largely had to work with one or another version of Microsoft BASIC built into ROM, or the BASIC created by their computer's manufacturers. There were no compilers for kids learning on the machines they got for Christmas. The 90s and QBasic were somewhere in the future. That is what this article is about. There may have been more PDP-8 BASIC programmers than microcomputer BASIC programmers, but they're not what this article was about.
- teddyh 4y agoI’m not sure why you are replying to my post, since you seem to be agreeing with me.
- themadturk 4y agoI was intending to add my reply to the parent message. Sorry!
- mysterydip 4y agoQBASIC was free and included with the most popular OS on computers at the time, as IBM-compatible was unifying the hardware landscape and more people than ever were buying PCs. And, as a result, it is what people commonly think of as "Basic."
- themadturk 4y agoQBASIC wasn't released until 1991, after the time this article is referring to.
- lll-o-lll 4y agoIt’s what you think of as Basic. Young whippersnappers today! Think it all started in the 90s! GWBasic foreeeever…
- PaulHoule 4y agoI remember a local high school when I was in elementary school having a PDP-8 which could be booted up in a single user or multi user mode to run BASIC that was not much better than a microcomputer BASIC. I remember using BASIC-PLUS on a PDP-11 running RSTS which I think could manage 20 terminals but the PDP-11 has the serious limitation that user space had a 64k address space just like a micro. This was a line number oriented BASIC like a micro BASIC. My high school had a VAX which also ran BASIC-PLUS but they taught intro programming with PASCAL and also had FORTRAN. I don’t remember that basic being procedurally oriented (other than GOSUB) but eventually DEC came out with VSI BASIC which let you write procedures and functions that you could link into libraries and call from other languages.