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When I was a kid, my dad upgraded our home computer from DOS 5 or 6 to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It was the first GUI that I ever used, and it was amazing co
by 90s_dev 1y ago
When I was a kid, my dad upgraded our home computer from DOS 5 or 6 to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It was the first GUI that I ever used, and it was amazing comparitively. Every app was mysterious and innovative and wonderful.
I tried Borland C++ and it was absolutely confusing, but I was probably just too young. Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time, but eventually I finally made a simple, terribly written and horribly broken Bomberman clone.
Those looking to experience something similar to that feeling should buy pico8.
- sksrbWgbfK 1y ago> Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time For one whole year, I thought that Qbasic and Turbo Pascal were text editors that could also run games. I didn't understood that I had access to real compilers and that I could actually change the programs. Sometimes kids are stupid... As for your Pico8 suggestion, you can always get the open-source equivalent https://tic80.com/ https://tic80.com/ if you don't have the money.
- 90s_dev 1y agoTic80 is great but Pico8 is better if you can afford it. And yeah, for a while I avoided strings in QBasic because I didn't have any clue how thread or yarn or whatever had anything to do with writing programs.
- Sharlin 1y agoI remember being confused why the Pascal/Delphi fractional numbers were called Single, Double, and Real. Like what did those words have to do with being able to use the decimal point?
- EvanAnderson 1y agoSharing fun kid computer misconceptions: I used a version of BASIC on my father's accounting computer that had an error message which included the word "ILLEGAL" (I forget what it was, exactly). I always assumed it had something to do with tax laws and the computer warning you not to break them.
- 3036e4 1y agoIn what ways? I paid for both, but I only use TIC-80 since I prefer open source and it has a FreeBSD port. I am also not sure if PICO8 supports alternative languages like Fennel or Janet as well as TIC-80 does?
- 90s_dev 1y agoThere's just something more polished, aesthetic and functional about the choice of limitations pico8 offers, whereas tic80 encourages decision paralysis.
- asveikau 1y agoI remember being a kid and seeing BASIC in a book from the library and not understanding how to run it. I thought maybe if you saved it in a file with the right extension it would just run. Eventually I figured out how to use the interpreter.
- xnorswap 1y agoYou've reminded me of how I near bricked the family 386 because I wanted to more easily play GORILLAS.BAS. I was quite used to loading it up in QBASIC.EXE and then executing it to play. But I wanted to just run it by opening the file in DOSSHELL. I knew Windows (possibly just DOSSHELL?) had the concept of file associations, so there I went reassociating things in ways I thought might get .BAS to "just run". It didn't work to get gorillas working, and in the process it seemed to mess up a bunch of other things. This was very late for still using a 386, I think our friends had pentiums by this point. I don't know if my Dad realised what I'd done and kept quiet about it, or just didn't realise how I'd been fiddling with those settings, but I think the extra "things seem wonky" was a nice excuse for us to finally get upgraded into the windows 95 and CD-ROM era.
- bestham 1y agoThen you learned your mistake and assumed that nibbles in FastTrackerII was coded into a module. Computers are hard.
- agumonkey 1y agoIt's a testimony of Turbo Pascal team.. the things was so lean and swift, compilation was near transparent. All this on early pentium and old cpus..
- charlieyu1 1y agoI liked Turbo Pascal when I was young. Debugger just works. Peeking into variables just works. Unfortunately, now I used print to debug for other languages because I thought debugger is too hard to setup
- dec0dedab0de 1y agoThat's ok, it took me like a decade to realize you could edit .bas files in any text editor.
- 3036e4 1y agoNot with the files saved from GW-BASIC though, unless you add the extra A parameter to save as ASCII. I learned that recently when setting up a repo to experiment with GW-BASIC 1.0 (unlike the later Microsoft BASICs the original GW-BASIC is open source). Annoying when saving the BAS files as ASCII they are still written as full blocks of some size 512 bytes?) with a ctrl-Z EOF to mark the end of the file. So there is some random binary garbage at the end of the file to strip away before committing changes. I wonder how common it was for DOS software to do that and how much sensitive information can be found at the end of released files if you look after the EOF marker?
- layer8 1y agoThis reminds me of the story of an office clerk who after using Excel for a year or two was amazed to learn that it could do calculations and wasn’t just a “tables” program.
- jbverschoor 1y agoMan qbasic and borland C were great on DOS
- mock-possum 1y agoAh QBASIC my first love
- PTOB 1y agoMy first bug fix ever was getting rid of that stupid tail that kept growing and wouldn't go away when you moved in NIBBLES.BAS.
- chgs 1y agoStill have the tune in my head. Then years later when everyone was waxing lyrical about snake on a Nokia and I’m “isn’t this just nibbles” and nobody knew what I was on about.
- pram 1y agoBorland was just confusing. One of the biggest strengths of Visual Basic was how intuitive it was, even for teenagers. There was a reason every AOL prog was written in VB!
- GrumpyNl 1y agoVB came around 9 years later.
- layer8 1y agoThe first versions of both Visual Basic and Borland C++ were released in 1991. Turbo C 1.0 was in 1987. Maybe you are thinking of Turbo Pascal 1.0, released in late 1983, but I’d argue that one wasn’t confusing, if you were in the business of using early DOS at all.
- 3036e4 1y agoI used Turbo Pascal 2.0 in the early 1990's because that was the old version my dad happened to have. You could not just go online and find whatever latest version of software you wanted to.
- rzzzt 1y agoI perused the files section of qbasic.com back then: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804015051/http://www.qbasic.com/catlist.shtml https://web.archive.org/web/20050804015051/http://www.qbasic... (One of my favorites is "3D Experiment" in category "Graphics": it shows a wireframe model of a spaceship that can be manipulated with the keyboard.)
- madaxe_again 1y agoI guess I was really lucky that I started out on a bbc micro, then got my hands on a c64, then an Amiga, before finally beholding windows 3.0. By the time I landed in the DOS world aged 8 or so, qbasic was my playground, and was easy to understand from the get-go, and Borland was where I cut my teeth writing something other than basic. One thing it took me a while to get my head around was that a 286 was not a 6502, and practically every little hack, address, anything CPU or memory architecture dependent thing I had learned was now irrelevant. Coming from Amiga workbench to windows actually felt like a downgrade in many ways, but it was the computer available to me at the time, and retrospectively a good move, as by 3.11 it was clear the wind was blowing to PCs. Either way, for me, growing with the machine was absolutely formative - the abstraction grew as I did, and I had started near the bottom.
- FireBeyond 1y agoMy college decided C++ was the first language they’d teach us. There was definitely a curve there.