What was your first programming language?

Today, some 39 years since buying myself the book "Basic BASIC", I look at the bash shell prompt and think, "I could solve this in 5 minutes if I had the TRS-80 BASIC shell."

Being able to launch "$ TRS-80" and get the shell my Model 3 had with the disk-access extensions would be great, even though I may be the only person in the world who thinks so.

The solutions used to get useful work out of 4K of RAM have been lost in the sea of hardware which we have inflicted upon ourselves.

Kids these days can't even knap flint!

i learned basic on a TRS-80 too. in highschool in 1989. i think the TRS-80 was already antiquated by then, but the school had a whole classroom full of them. they all booted from a server to which they were connected with a serial cable i suppose. that way the floppy disk was freed up for students to save their programs.

greetings, eMBee.

My first language? Fortran for a college course.

The first language I really used? Basic on the Tandy Color Computer.

Nostalgia:

The first computer I had that would run a high level (Basic) language was an S100 system with a Z80 card that I soldered together from piece parts.

But really my very first computer (assembly language only) was one I designed on a napkin, wire wrapped, and then debugged. All we had then was the 8bit Intel 8008 chip and it sure did need a lot of support circuitry. Nevertheless, it was a reliable machine for me for years until I finally went with the Z80 upgrade.

The first language I wrote any programs in was BASIC. I believe it was specifically the AppleBASIC (or whatever they called the version of BASIC on Apple II computers; I could be misremembering) that we used in school. I also had a Timex/Sinclair 1000 which had a BASIC shell (mine had the 16K memory upgrade module). I eventually fooled around in QBASIC for DOS a bit, but I never got deeply into that.

I wonder if basic256 or bwbasic would allow me to relive the days when it was the only language I was familiar with.

Vic 20 for me running Commodore Basic.

BTW, hiya Bob! Long time no hear.

Speaking of first computers, Jerry Pournelle has passed away. Many of us grew up with his computer columns.

@jdixon

Not to mention his wonderful SF novels.

originally basica from ibm, and quickbasic.

ive tried other languages, written a lengthy bash tutorial, tried 25-50 basic dialects, spent 5 years looking for a "21st century basic" that worked in gnu/linux. (yep, tried that one. yes, that one too.)

finally settled on python (python 2 is still closer to basic, and some pros prefer it, no matter what google tells you.)

have used python for nearly a decade, now i do basic-inspired shell languages in it.

bob, nice forum. youll want to load this in mpv or vlc, either of which let you adjust the playback speed (mpv uses [ and ] for that) https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Fig-Codi... now tell me-- what features of basic shell are bash missing? (not a challenge; im always interested in questions like that.)

Quoting:"I could solve this in 5 minutes if I had the TRS-80 BASIC shell."

You lucky one! 64 columns, full QWERTY-keyboard, you even had a shell, 110 Volt, line numbers to 'goto', floppy drives to save stuff! What a splendid life!

In 'my time', when we were programming BASIC on the Zilog Z80, we could only dream of such a luxury!

Black and white, 8 lines by 16 columns and ~50 keys, only 1406 possibilities for 'goto', that's all we had! We did all programming using only 2 thumbs! And still reaching 100 strokes per minute BTW, I timed! Most amazingly, I did it while being bored while waiting for the bus; without remote access!

When 'my time' was? Guess what.

It was 2000!

Curious what it was? Spoiler here

Great. Monty Python have hijacked the thread. Just lovely.

My first computer was a PDP-11 (teletype!) with some form of BASIC. I also had a manual of BASIC, but that one was for a different machine. Still, I was able to squeeze of quite some programs on that one. They were stored on an 8" floppy. My first private machine was a Sinclair Spectrum which I expanded with a crack interface, a programmable joystick interface, a Centronics printer interface, a disk interface with 2 true 5.25" inch floppies, a DK'tronics keyboard and a REAL monitor.

But in the late eighties that overly expensive 64K machine was replaced by an "IBM compatible". Still, I think it's the best language to learn programming, because it is quite forgiving. In the meanwhile I wrote my own BASIC (https://rosettacode.org/wiki/UBasic/4tH) and even ported one of my favorite games on the Spec to it (https://sourceforge.net/p/forth-4th/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/4th...).

The only BASIC program which survived the PDP-11 was this one, which was ported to Forth (https://sourceforge.net/p/forth-4th/code/HEAD/tree/trunk/4th...).