The basics of BASIC.
Whew.. Longest episode I've made in a while. It took me a whole week working every day to complete this. A big thanks goes out to Clint from LGR, Ben Heckendorn, and Jim Leonard for their contributions.
As always, still working on CC and thumbnail. So it will go out for public release tomorrow.
The basics of BASIC, the programming language of the 1980s. (YouTube)
Comments (30)
Awesome! :) I really enjoy hearing about the old-school programmer culture of the 80's.
loved this episode, i would've liked to see the full version, any chance you can publish it? Perhaps here :) Basic on my '80 computer is what actually made me pursuit a carrer in IT.
There is no full version. When I say that I "cut" something out.. what I really mean, is that I scripted something, but never actually filmed the scenes..
Really great episode!
Love the extended format, can't wait to see more on BASIC. It looks like the Apple II editor is VI style with escape allowing for movement with JK keys? Also the fact the you wrote that Tetris game in a day is mind blowing and I want to try building a game now. Think I'll stick with Swift though haha.
hello! just finished the episode and I was curious if that tetris program was on c64 and if so if you would post the code you did? I'd like to copy it into my c64 that I recently bought off of eBay. which btw was completely inspired by your channel! also, got the CD several days ago! thanks for that! look forward to what you've got in store!
I just added the Tetris game to my website this morning, so it is in the software section with all of the rest of my stuff.
I'm hoping to see you eventually cover the Cauzin Softstrip, which was at the time, the proposed solution to manually typing in programs from magazines line-by-line each month.
For anyone wanting to experience what the "home computer" BASIC culture was like, archive.org has a huge collection of many of the major computing magazines of the time period. <a href="https://archive.org/details/computermagazines" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/computermagazines</a> There were many machine-specific magazines, but Family Computing, Creative Computing, and COMPUTE! from the early 1980s were packed full of BASIC and machine language program listings for all the popular systems like Apple II, Commodore 64, Atari 800, Tandy and so forth. Some authors would provide optional code blocks to make the programs use the special text/graphics/sound features of different systems, so compatibility was sometimes possible. Just click on this August 1982 Compute! magazine for example, and start flipping through, starting at about page 34. <a href="https://archive.org/details/1982-08-compute-magazine" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://archive.org/details/1982-08-compute-magazine</a>
Ahahaha. When I saw the backspace on the apple II I was immediately taken back to using my older brother's apple. Why is it the backspace didn't work, anyway?
(I dunno if 8-bit guy cares if other people respond..) ROM space was extremely tight, but also many programs depended on the ROM being permanent and unchanging due to programmers making naughty undocumented calls to code outside well defined ROM code entry points. And the Apple II line carried on far longer than anyone imagined (especially when the III flopped). So they just kept tacking on new hardware features but not updating the ROMs. Backspace was a new key on the IIe, as was Caps Lock and built-in lowercase. Typing commands in lowercase on a first-release IIe is also not supported. I believe these both work properly on the Enhanced IIe, IIc, and IIgs. There were many new features like this with delayed or no added ROM / BASIC support: double-low/double-high graphics, super hires on the IIgs, the IIgs sound chip, and being able to use only 48k of available memory for BASIC even if you have 128k or more installed.
Any chance you'll upload a "directors cut" or some cut scenes? I was drawn back to the early 80's and my coco 3 the whole episode.
Not really.. You see, a lot of people assume when I "cut" a scene that I cut it during editing. But what I usually mean is that I scripted the scene, possibly even recorded the narration to it. But I never filmed it.
lol I don't like Linux because commands and text. I like Linux because I know what's happening under the hood and the power it gives it users. Also FOSS!!!
I noticed you pronounced "Epyx" as E P Y X. The correct pronunciation is "Epics" as like a plural form of epic. Just a small detail.
I've heard it pronounced both ways. Since it was always shown in upper-case letters, I erred on the side of spelling it out.
See? This is just perfect! Great work. Edutainment 101! :D Keep up the good work!
Did you know there were some guys as Microsoft that had the same problem "Can't just turn on the PC and type away" - and wrote this: <a href="http://smallbasic.com/" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://smallbasic.com/</a>
Fantastic episode. I'm looking forward to the others.
I learned BASIC in summer camp between 5th and 6th grade. Unfortunately, after a couple of years on DOS and Windows, I forgot it.
Fantastic stuff as usual!
Great video! I had a number of the Micro Adventure books when I was a kid. I had completely forgotten about them until watching this! :)
Great video! I enjoy the demoscene-esk outro music.
Very well done :) I enjoyed this episode a lot, it's great when you do colabs also :)
Good job on the episode, looking forward to next week! Remember when I was a kid and had bought my first computer (Amstrad PCW 8256, mainly because it was cool looking), got my hands on a copy of Basic Computer Games. Had no understanding of the various versions of Basics, but I managed to type in the "Super Star Trek" game which I had many fun hours with. Until I bought a real usable computer, the C64 :).
I saw that one in the book, but it looked kind of long.
as a kid I remember type a whole day a program that didn't worked because I used GW-basic on a pc and some commands didn't worked on that version of basic..
I remember Microadventures! I think I bought one when the book fair came to school. A lot of the programs wouldn't work on my 99/4a.
I remember me standing in a shopping mall typing in BASIC listings for hours in a VC20 they had there in display, because I did not own a computer by my self. I live in Germany and back then our shops did close at 6:30 pm and I was thrown out of the shop without having a chance to check if the program even runs :-) Thanks for the very nice video!
I have fond memories of BASIC.