I agree that dropping into the basic interpreter was amazing on the old 8 bit computers. Things have really changed recently with the popularity of Retro computing as I wrote about the exact same thing around 10-15 years ago (I can't find the post unfortunately) and I was downvoted a lot as almost all the commenters seemed to think that accessing DevTools in Google Chrome and entering Javascript commands was that same thing as the interactive Basic mode of a Commodore 64 in my case. Oh, how times have changed for the better now :)
I feel like BASIC on my C64 was the last time I really, intuitively understood what my computer was doing when I was programming and executing software.<p>There are so many layers between me and the hardware today that I feel like I float above it, and that I just have to trust it all intrinsically.<p>I don't, really, and it constantly gives me this feeling of almost falling.
> If you ran out of numbers, the renum command would recompute all the line numbers for you.<p>This is the first time I heard of such a BASIC command, even though I grew up learning to program on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum.<p>Which of the home computers of the time had this command? Would it renumber in multiples of 10?
BASIC was an IDE even going back to Kemeny and Kurtz in the 60s. The upshot of that was, it was one of the first times nontechnical people would even countenance writing programs for a computer. Instead of having to use a keypunch to author the program and then submit the cardstack to an operator, you could author, run, and debug the program by sitting at the teletype and entering some simple commands along with your program.<p>Members of the Dartmouth football team wrote a football simulation for Dartmouth BASIC back then; a port of this game for microcomputer BASICs is available in David H. Ahl's <i>BASIC Computer Games</i> as "FTBALL".
One important aspect TFA is not explaining is that you could move the cursor around the screen and edit and re-execute any command or program line. So it wasn’t just a linear REPL. And it didn’t have history nor typically copy & paste.
I remember when I finally figured out the point of GOSUB (I was maybe 13, so 1986), and why it was more powerful than GOTO. Still no stack, and the only calling convention was that RETURN would take you back to the line after where you called GOSUB.<p>Writing this words now, I don't know that I ever looked into what happened if you called GOSUB from a GOSUB routine, or how deep you could call. That would imply some sort of stack!<p>[edited to correct a typo]
Similarly, I’ve heard some people call early Forth systems of the 1980s to be complete operating systems, which I would agree with. Many of them shipped with tiny editors, block management systems, and multitaskers. It was one of the most interesting eras of computing.
Always thought the raspberry pi was missing a trick by not just dropping straight into basic. It is supposed to be a learning tool, Linux is a brick wall of a learning curve (imo!)<p>Anyway it's been a very long time since I used my raspberry pi, maybe this is now a feature.
BASIC was my door to programming and computers. I experienced it in my 7th grade in the late 80s when I had the fortune of one of my friends owning a Commodore 64. What a thrill it was, so many weekend afternoons vanished into thin air...
I got started on a CPC with Locomotive BASIC before upgrading my system with disk drive, 256KB RAM pack, ROMS, and CP/M 2.2 and then 3.0. Sought out CP/M because of the amount of free software already available. Programmed in BASIC, BCPL, and eventually C (not a great fit for the Z80). It’s hard to express the value of this learning experience to young users today.
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."<p>--Edsger Dijkstra (1975)