[ale] [ALE] Happy Birthday BASIC

Wed May 8 11:50:01 EDT 2024

Chuck,

Many people did not recognize the benefit of pulling down the source code and typing it in by hand.

"Wow!  What does that error mean?   I typed it in just like....oh...I made a mistake!"

You had a syntax error, and BASIC showed it right away (most of the time anyway).

But maybe your syntax was correct and your program still did not work.  Maybe the error was that you meant to type "2" and you typed "3' by mistake....a "run-time error".

You do not get to create or fix these problems if all you do is pull binaries off the web or load them from a CDROM.

This was EXACTLY why the professors at Cambridge University started the Raspberry Pi project.   They realized that the freshmen of today often knew less about computers than the freshmen of 20 years ago...the ones who 20 years ago downloaded source code and (in some cases) even had to COMPILE it and LINK it in order to run it.

Happy Birthday, BASIC!

md

> On 05/08/2024 8:10 AM EDT Chuck Payne via Ale <ale at ale.org> wrote:
>  
>  
> I am surprised that this one didn't get an email. Happy Birthday BASIC, it turned 60. It only three years older than me, and has more functions than me too.
>  
> https://www.tomshardware.com/software/programming/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60-dartmouth-basic-started-it-all-in-1964
>  
> As a kid, I got into BASIC because it was the way to get games. I forgot the name of the magazine, but I would buy it every month and sit at my VIC 20, trying the code in, playing such games and Oil, where you drill to get oil hoping to hit a pocket with a devil in it. Or trying to understand what the data fields were doing. 
>  
> Since I missed the 4th as well, here some BASIC Code for you guys 
>  
> https://www.goto10retro.com/p/star-wars-theme-in-basic 
> 
> Yes, I was one of those kids that would type some weird messages on the computers tha would repeat, like 
> 
> 10 print "Long live ALE, bring more beer"
> 20 goto 10
> 
> Happy Computing guys
>  
> --
> Terror PUP a.k.a
> Chuck "PUP" Payne
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