Those of us ancient enough to remember the time, or even having grown up during the heyday of the 8-bit home computer, may recall the pain of trying to make your latest creation work on another brand of computer. They all spoke some variant of BASIC, yet were wildly incompatible with each other regardless. BASICODE was a neat solution to this, acting as an early compatibility standard and abstraction layer. It was essentially a standardized BASIC subset with a few extra routines specialized per platform.
But that’s only part of the story. The BASICODE standard program was invented by Dutch radio engineer Hessel de Vries, who worked for the Dutch national radio broadcaster Nederlandse Omroep Stichting (NOS). It was designed to be broadcast over FM radio! The idea of standardization and free national deployment was brilliant and lasted until 1992, when corporate changes and technological advancements ultimately led to its decline.
The way this was achieved was to firstly use only the hardware instructions that were common among all the computers, which meant BASICODE applications couldn’t utilize graphics, sound, or even local storage. This may seem very limiting, but there’s still a lot you can do with that, especially if you don’t have to write it yourself, pay for it, or even leave the room! First, the BASICODE program needed to be loaded from local storage, which, when started, allowed the import of the BASICODE application that you previously recorded off the radio. It’s kind of like a manually loaded bootloader, except it includes an additional software library that the application can use.
Later versions of the standard included storage handling (or an emulation of it), basic monochrome graphics, and eventually sound support. The linked Wikipedia article mentions a list of about 23 BASICODE platforms; however, since there is a standard, you could easily create your own with some effort. In addition to allowing users to send application programs, BASICODE also enabled the reading of FM-broadcast ‘journals,’ which were transmissions of news, programming tutorials, and other documents that might interest BASICODE users. It was an interesting concept that this writer had never encountered at the time, but that’s not surprising since only one country adopted it.
If this has got you hankering for the good old days, before the internet, when it was just you, your trusty machine and your own imagination, then we think the ten-line BASIC competition might be of interest. Don’t have such a machine, but have a web browser? (we know you do), then check this out. Finally, if you want to see something really crazy (for a BASIC program), then we’ve got that covered as well.
Thanks to [Suren Y] for sending this in!
Interesting. But I don’t know what the title has to do with it. A bit like Java? Where? In what? Nothing could be further from Java. Did whoever wrote the title want to write “Java” somewhere because they felt like it? A mystery.
Write once, run anywhere.
Hardware-independence.
There had been so many BASIC dialects at the time.
The only sort of industry “standard” was Microsoft’s BASIC implementation due to popularity, maybe.
But even here the level of compatibility was hit and miss, depending on the computer model.
The C64 BASIC V2 was inferior to that of ZX81 or BBC Micro computers, for example.
There had been learning computers (toy computers) made for kids age 6 and up with more complete BASIC than C64 BASIC.
Agreed. This has much more in common with JavaScript. They’re both interpreted, have janky abstraction and severely limited functionality based on the lowest common denominator. Sadly, I can’t seem to escape either language professionally.
Gr😎vy. I cut my teeth on ZXBASIC. ZX81 vintage.ight give it a look-see.
This idea of wanting to reach out beyond your computer in the days before the internet reminds me of how I did this in the early 1990s. (The internet existed at the time, and so did BBSes, but that required money, which I didn’t really have.) I had a portable SCSI hard drive I would take to various college computer labs all over the East Coast, plug into a Macintosh, and then explore the network for warez to download. I would fill up on all sorts of amazing programs, including an early gene sequencing application. I would then take them home and hack them to bypass their copy protections, which often included physical dongles. I got very good at finding where in the code the jumps happened and redirecting them. Ah, those were the days!
The concept was cooler than reality, at least from the perspective of a 13 year old (which was my age at the time). The weekly broadcasts contained stuff like “towers of Hanoi” or a perpetual calendar program or something else that from a technical perspective was fun or interesting, but for my it just didn’t compare to the colorful games and pretty music included with the Arcade games I could copy from my friends at school. So interest dropped pretty quickly.
CHIP-8 also was kind of related to P-Code or Java, I think.
But it was from the 1970s. And it had graphics support, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHIP-8