No one seemed to remember the 50th anniversary of the BASIC programming language:
And I expect no one remembers (according to what I have read) that one of the beauties of BASIC was that you could run programs immediately on a time-sharing terminal. In contrast for FORTRAN you probably prepared your program with punched cards which you submitted to a big mainframe like the IBM 360 and got the results a few hours later.
1964: PRINT “Hi”
2014: GOTO 1964
I remember it very well. Not the birth, but a few years later. I’d seen the process of starting up a card reader to compile and run FORTRAN with some cards getting punched on the back end, but the first few lines of code I ever wrote were in BASIC. Shortly after that I jumped in the other direction and became an assembly language programmer, fun for other reasons.
Probably something like 32 years ago, my parents got a TRS-80 console and pinball game cartridge. My brother, sister, and I had fun playing pinball, but I was the one who tried turning the console on without the cartridge in it. (I’m the baby of the family.)
After looking at the words that came up, I asked Daddy what BASIC was. Fortunately, as a Computer Science professor, he knew, and was even able to get me some BASIC programming books for the TRS-80. And the rest is history! 
I remember running BASIC on time-sharing terminals - both CRT (in the late 1970s, BASIC was the language used for introductory computer courses at Cal-Berkeley, before switching to PASCAL by the time I attended in 1980) and actual teletype (which is what my high school had).
I still use BASIC in the form of Realbasic (now Xojo).
It’s object-oriented and compiled, and doesn’t resemble the original version very much.
It’s the most wonderful rapid-prototyping and cross-platform application development system!
still nice for a quickie.
What are the :s for?
Thanks for sharing that.
Great article and I read it all the way through, getting distracted here and there with some of the links and what not, so it took most of the evening! Brought back lots of fond memories from long ago - I started programming at 12 or 13 back in the early 80s.
I spent some time checking out the Quite BASIC website linked in the article and will no doubt go back and play there some more. I would really like for my kid to get at least a taste of programming and that seems like a good way to go about it. I might check out some of the other contemporary BASIC versions, but the Quite BASIC was very accessible.
Fortunately I get to do a fair bit of programming as one part of my job, so I still get to scratch that itch and now I get paid to do it!
whynotboth.jpg ? : )
I used to write BASIC programs for the VIC-20 that would jump to machine code subroutines where speed was needed - mostly for graphics that were way too slow otherwise. We did not have an assembler though, so many hours were spent assembling by hand - looking up opcodes, manually calculating branch lengths, re-calculating branches when I changed the code, converting to hex to decimal, and so on and so on. It was crazy tedious - but great fun just the same and the speed boost was unbelievable!
A recent computer thread here got me to searching around to see if there were any 6502 simulators out there. The one I found is java based running in a browser and it was awesome playing around with it. I wish I had more time to spend re-living that part of my youth…