14 thoughts on “Learning BASIC like it’s 1983”

  1. I think primary school kids should have 8-bit systems.
    Secondary 16/32-bit, Tertiary all the other systems.

    Why do we give the most modern [ confusing ] systems to students and then wonder why there is a massive gap is engineering knowledge…

  4. I did it in 1982 o/ <3
    Hundreds of hex code lines with a For Loop reading & Poking them in Ram …
    Loading programs from a 300 baud tape…
    Managing [A-Z][A-Z0-9]? variable names…
    Having no RENUM command…
    Writing GOTO target in Hex (GOTO #1234) because it's faster to execute…

  6. Thomas Mueller There was no low-level language, and virtually no software. We programmed in machine language “by hand” by calculating ourselves jumping offsets.
    I would have paid a lot to get an ASM.

  12. I never had a Commodore, but my dad bought a Memotech MTX512 with the dual floppy drive and the CP/M card, so I did a lot of Z80 assembler. I still have the machine stored at my dad’s place. I started with Basic, but my dad bought Turbo Pascal for CP/M, and I was hooked.

  13. Later I had an Atari 1024 with Lattice C on protected 3″½ floppies that were noisier than a plane :))
    I coded lot of GFA Basic too, no line#, control structs ( repeat, while, … ) subs with parameters aso …

  14. [ pulls out his massive retro todger ]
    I have a working copy of SAS ‘C’ on an A600 with source from ’92-93 that amazingly ported to Ubuntu when I changed all the KnR style procedure defs from “proc_name ( var_name_list ) var defs” to “proc_name ( var-defs )”

    I’m so bored with ‘modern’ tech. [ more to do with having no remit and being retired at 48! ]