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by gushie 1471 days ago
I spent 20+ years in my day job programming in BASIC on OpenVMS without using line numbers or GOTO's. Yet the first thing I did here was fall back to my childhood Sinclair/BBC BASIC of trying 10 PRINT "Hello" 20 GOTO 10
2 comments

Can you talk about what you worked on in BASIC on VMS?
Software for the Agribusiness sector - mostly around the manufacture and selling of animal feed. So data entry, processing, interfacing, reporting. We had the legacy system which was a text terminal interface, as well as a newer browser based system that interfaced via webservices to the OpenVMS BASIC code. After 40 years it went end of life at the end of last year.
Wow, thank you for sharing!

I'm not surprised that the system lasted that long! VMS is legendary.

I've looked through the documentation for OpenVMS BASIC and it does seem like it was a nice platform.

The entire VMS system appears to be quite a comfy environment to have worked in. (DCL, help system, documentation, standard libraries, multiple languages (Pascal, C, BASIC))

It was quite advanced BASIC, so I imagine any kind of business application.

https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=emr_na...

Hey pjmlp!

Yes indeed. The docs for VMS are great. Really cool environment.

On an unrelated note, have you seen this video yet?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31701231

Very G-rated. It was always

10 PRINT "BOOBS" 20 GOTO 10

in all the department stores where I grew up...