3 ms·

Fifty Years of Basic, the Language That Made Computers Personal (2014)

• retrocryptid 3y ago
  On BASIC's 59th birthday, I'm going to keep posting BASIC-related content until someone upvotes one of these articles. (seriously though... this is a great article that captures the zeitgeist of the time when "knowing how to use a personal computer meant knowing how to program one.")
  • buescher 3y ago
    It's hard to capture for a modern audience. It's not just, say, the tutorial books that were packed in with the home computers (the curious might try one of the ones for the Apple II, Atari 8-bits, or Commodore 64 with an emulator. The one for the VIC-20 is also charming.) but the whole ecosystem of books and magazines. Plus it was a lingua franca like Matlab or Python. Gian-Carlo Rota's ODE book has a nice simple 4th order Runge-Kutte implementation in BASIC, for example.
    • retrocryptid 3y ago
      Fwiw... I've heard the BASIC manual which came with the TIMEX/SINCLAIR 1000 was EXCELLENT. If there were any companies who documented their products any more, I would recommend they look at those old texts for inspiration.