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Did you also use Dartmouth BASIC6 on a DCTS connection? That was my first language, and god it was miserable. But on the same machine we had BASIC8 which was es
by matthewdgreen 3y ago
Did you also use Dartmouth BASIC6 on a DCTS connection? That was my first language, and god it was miserable. But on the same machine we had BASIC8 which was essentially True Basic.
- analog31 3y agoDon't know. It was what we got when we entered BASIC. We didn't have the manual, but only our textbook. The timeshare was on some kind of minicomputer. I later got a summer internship at the facility that hosted this thing, and the rack of modems was as big as the computer.
- matthewdgreen 3y agoI wrote a multi-thousand line conferencing program in BASIC6. It was an absolute nightmare (no subroutines, everything global, line numbers were hardcoded and couldn't be changed.) Weirdly, the experience was almost like learning an assembler as your first language -- you had to keep state for everything. Learning Pascal and C after that was actually a huge relief.
- analog31 3y agoIt's still amazing, considering that there was no networking at the time. Today, a conferencing program would be able to take advantage of phenomenal networking infrastructure, yet instead of multi-thousand, it would be multi-million lines, and still an absolute nightmare. Some sort of Parkinson's law applies: The code expands until it becomes unmanageable. When AI can write code for itself, it will be trillions of lines.