Clive Thompson writes about the influence of BASIC (“the most consequential language in the history of computing”) and the giddy adolescent thrill of using it for the first time. “I felt like I’d just stolen fire from Zeus himself.”
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Discussion 3 comments
Oh man I’m so nostalgic for BASIC. When I was I think 6 or 7 my sister, 5 years older than me, went to computer camp and learned it. We had some sort of implementation of BASIC on my mom’s Atari ST that she got for her work (she worked from home in the 80s which also seems wild to me in retrospect.)
Anyway, my sister taught me the fundamentals of BASIC and we ended up getting all these computer books and magazines with BASIC programs and just spent so much time transcribing the programs, tweaking them and coming up with our own variations of stuff. It really did feel like magic to me. The fact that I could make a program to ask someone’s age and then tell them how old they’d be in the year 2000? 🤯
I’ve dabbled with programming ever since. I’ve never been a developer but I do now work in IT and computers are basically my hobby in one form or another. And 100% I attribute that to my mom, my sister and BASIC.
Yes! We had a couple of these MicroAdventures books. Here is an emulator and the text of the adventure. HELLO WORLD
https://auri-microadventure.azurewebsites.net/
I don't think we ever used those! I can't remember the name of the computer magazines we used, but I'm pretty sure we had the book "BASIC Computer Games."
BTW, Jeff Atwood started an amazing project on GitHub to update the games in that book to modern, memory safe languages. It's really something special.
In sort of a similar spirit, I made a Python script a while ago to simulate the classic "Game of Life" board game to teach my kids a little bit of programming but also teach them how terrible that game is and how it relies only on chance. (I failed because they still love playing that game.)
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