It basically has zero value now, but perhaps my only claim to "fame" in the 90s was writing the first (at least popularly known) raycaster in QBasic which then spawned a ton of clones (the comp.lang.basic.misc community was strong then). It was absolutely hideous and naive but getting credited in far smarter people's larger creations as their inspiration was an eye opener for me :-) (And a feat I have not repeated, alas!)<p><a href="http://home.kpn.nl/nebula/articfls%5Carticle1.html" rel="nofollow">http://home.kpn.nl/nebula/articfls%5Carticle1.html</a>
<a href="http://www.o-bizz.de/qbdown/qbcom/files/txtreng.bas" rel="nofollow">http://www.o-bizz.de/qbdown/qbcom/files/txtreng.bas</a>
I managed to dig up one of my old 3d demo projects:<p>Source: <a href="https://gist.github.com/dhotson/686036fb771fbbca8c48" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/dhotson/686036fb771fbbca8c48</a><p>Screenshot: <a href="http://i.imgur.com/4fpaYtO.png" rel="nofollow">http://i.imgur.com/4fpaYtO.png</a><p>.. it's not as embarrassing as I expected. :)
IIRC the version bundled with DOS6.22 was severly limited: it couldn't generate executables and the built-in help was only for IDE, without help on the language at all. That's because MS was also selling QBasic "pro" version. It was basically impossible to buy any software then in my country, so I was stuck with normal QBasic for a few years, until I got Internet connection and pirated a full version (it was still impossible to buy software here - no one bothered selling it at all here until a bit later).<p>Still, bundling a quite capable IDE with an OS was a very nice practice, but it basically ended then, probably because MS also sold Visual Basic. Without QBasic I wouldn't have started programming at all - I wonder how it would be if I was starting right now. Is there any ubiquitous, simple language available basically everywhere and with a nice IDE by default? JavaScript almost fits the bill, but as a beginner who doesn't know any better you're likely to use Notepad, while with QBasic you had a real IDE from the beginning.
In the late 90's there were several great QBasic communities (NeoZones was one I would frequent the most). I think these more than the fondness of the language/IDE were what kept me interested in learning software. Most of the communities seemed to die along with popularity of the language in the early 2000's.
I'm wondering what impact to future programmers the current state of programming will have. Back when i was using qbasic there were very few distractions, as a self taught programmer if you wanted to build something you had to figure out how to do it yourself. No frameworks, no google, no stackoverflow noise just a couple of libraries and infromation from a couple of books I had access to as a kid. I remember for my first PC I knew the purpose of every single file on its 21mb of hard disk, try doing that today..
Shout-out to QB64 - An attempt at a modern version/compiler for QBasic code, as well as updated features. I used to do a fair amount of programming in QB64, and the design of the language hampers it as a general-purpose language, it's a fun language for learning and writing in.
I remember using basic during my demo coding days to find the optimum algorithms.
When everything is running at 0.5fps it's easy to sport which implementation is the fastest. So after trying a few methods I would determine the fastest and implement it in asm1.<p>I miss those days, that was fun.
This is fantastic. My first game was in GW-BASIC, but I quickly upgraded once I discovered QBasic on DOS 6.22. I also loved the MS-DOS Shell (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_Shell</a>) found on the supplemental disk of v6.22. It felt like multitasking...but wasn't.
My whole fascination with computers and ultimately my career in programming started with QBasic. When I was 7 years old we had a 286 with DOS and running Norton Commander. I knew all the games I played, ran by selecting the ".EXE" file so I started looking for other "EXEs" when I ran across "QBasic.exe", I thought it might be a game so I ran it and started digging around. I came across some sample applications and more importantly the Help menu (QBasic had the one of the most incredible help systems ever). I started copying the samples for each command, then chaining them together to see what I could do. I can still remember the thrill I felt the first time I typed code and had the computer do what I wanted, it was life altering! My dad later bought me a book called "101 BASIC Computer Games", that's when I discovered that all flavors of BASIC are not equal and I then taught myself debugging.
Having started with ZX Spectrum BASIC (Timex 2068), followed by hexdumps, and moving into GW-Basic/Turbo Basic and Assembly after getting my first PC, I never coding anything meaningful in QBasic.<p>For me, those were the days to start learning Turbo Pascal, and QBasic was used mainly to run nibbles and gorillas, when I got bored of a coding session.
QBasic was also how I started programming.
When I found out you can edit the code ...<p>I printed programs on the school printer. Then typed it in when I got home, as we did not have any Internet. Sometimes I got banned for printing non-school-work.<p>I've heard similar stories from people printing machine code, so I guess it wasn't that bad writing QBasic.
I learned QBasic from a Boy Scout magazine when I was in 4th grade. It was a letter jumble game and my dad helped me on our old Windows 3.1 machine. Never looked back.