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by PaulHoule
425 days ago
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They built a Route 93 bypass around Manchester, NH and a new mall in 1980, not long after that I bought a copy of "101 BASIC Computer Games" from the Digital [1] Store there (really!) This was the minicomputer edition that David Ahl had published when he worked at DEC, not the microcomputer edition that he produced at Creative Computing magazine. I was typing those programs into a TRS-80 Color Computer which had a very good implementation of Microsoft BASIC enhanced with commands to draw lines, circles and flood fills on a high resolution screen. The text mode only had 32 characters across, but you could get most programs to work on it. That generation of games was intended to be run on a teleprinter so they did not use any graphics other than drawing scenes with ASCII characters and didn't use any commands to write text at specific places on the screen. Later in the 1980s you saw books with more complex BASIC games that implemented shooters and Pac-Man clones and such but all of those were specific to a particular computer whereas Ahl's games were portable even though you'd often have to modify the programs a little to get them to work. By 1991 though I was done with BASIC. I had a ROM cartridge with an assembler by 1982 or so but I was still writing a lot of BASIC. Circa 1985 I was doing a lot with the OS-9 operating system which had a C compiler and BASIC09 which was particularly advanced, I remember writing a FORTH in 6809 assembly. Circa 1987 I had a 286 PC which had a wide range of programming languages including various BASICs, but Turbo Pascal was my favorite, though I switched to C in college (where I was in '91) because C was portable to the 32-bit workstations they had. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Equipment_Corporation |
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Pretty sure these first few languages affected or shaped my childhood mental development somehow, for better or worse, and how I think about and express programs. Especially with BASIC, I was so young I was still learning how to think and talk in a human language, along with how to think with and talk to a computer.