People 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 1980

People 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.