On the Commodore PET, at least, you could do all kinds of clever things with BASIC due to the special graphics characters and the "cursor control" characters th

On the Commodore PET, at least, you could do all kinds of clever things with BASIC due to the special graphics characters and the "cursor control" characters that could be embedded in strings (up/down/left/right etc). One of my hacks was a playable, graphic video game in one line of code (almost the full maximum 80 characters) and another is the standard 1-liner that generates mazes. For examples of fancy BASIC graphic programs, search for: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cursor+tape+magazine https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=cursor+tape+mag... Cursor magazine programs did occasionally have an assembly language subroutine; at least one flashed the screen using one. But most of them were just BASIC. Purists may scoff, but kids with zero experience could make animated graphics after just a day or two of playing around, and curiosity about how more sophisticated programs worked (in my case: The "Miser" text adventure game) would soon motivate to find out more. Is that bad? It was the whole point of the language, the B stands for "Beginner". Plenty of time to graduate to other things later (in my case: Assembly language -> Pascal -> C).