Ask Hackaday: Should We Teach BASIC?

July 21, 2024 by Al Williams 183 Comments

Suppose you decide you want to become a novelist. You enroll in the Hackaday Famous Novelists School where your instructor announces that since all truly great novels are written in Russian, our first task will be to learn Russian. You’d probably get up and leave. The truth is, what makes a great (or bad) novel transcends any particular language, and you could make the same argument for programming languages.

Despite the pundits, understanding the basics of how computers work is more important than knowing C, Java, or the language of the week. A recent post by [lackofimagination] proposes that we should teach programming using BASIC. And not a modern whizz-pow BASIC, but old-fashioned regular BASIC as we might have used it in the 1980s.

Certainly, a whole generation of programmers cut their teeth on BASIC. On the other hand, the programming world has changed a lot since then. While you can sort of apply functional and object-oriented techniques to any programming language, it isn’t simple and the details often get in the way of the core ideas.

Still, some things don’t change. The idea of variables, program flow, loops, and arrays all have some parallel in just about anything, so we can see some advantages to starting out simply. After all, you don’t learn to drive by trying it out in the Indy 500, right?

What do you think? If you were teaching programming today, would you start with BASIC? Or with something else? You can modernize a little bit with QB64. Or try EndBasic which just recently had a new release.

BASIC Classroom Management

May 25, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 22 Comments

While we don’t see it used very often these days, BASIC was fairly revolutionary in bringing computers to the masses. It was one of the first high-level languages to catch on and make computers useful for those who didn’t want to (or have time) to program them in something more complex. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t capable of getting real work done — this classroom management software built in the language illustrates its capabilities.

Written by [Mike Knox], father of [Ethan Knox] aka [norton120], for his classroom in 1987, the programs were meant to automate away many of the drudgeries of classroom work. It includes tools for generating random seating arrangements, tracking attendance, and other direct management tasks as well as tools for the teacher more directly like curving test grades, tracking grades, and other tedious tasks that normally would have been done by hand at that time. With how prevalent BASIC was at the time, this would have been a powerful tool for any educator with a standard desktop computer and a floppy disk drive.

Since most people likely don’t have an 80s-era x86 machine on hand capable of running this code, [Ethan] has also included a docker container to virtualize the environment for anyone who wants to try out his father’s old code. We’ve often revisited some of our own BASIC programming from back in the day, as our own [Tom Nardi] explored a few years ago.

Hackaday Links: May 5, 2024

May 5, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

It may be hard to believe, but BASIC turned 60 this week. Opinions about the computer language vary, of course, but one thing everyone can agree on is that Professors Kemeny and Kurtz really stretched things with the acronym: “Beginner’s All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code” is pretty tortured, after all. BASIC seems to be the one language it’s universally cool to hate, at least in its current incarnations like Visual Basic and VBA. But back in 1964, the idea that you could plunk someone down in front of a terminal, or more likely a teletype, and have them bang out a working “Hello, world!” program with just a few minutes of instruction was pretty revolutionary. Yeah, line numbers and GOTO statements encouraged spaghetti code and engrained bad programming habits, but at least it got people coding. And perhaps most importantly, it served as a “gateway drug” into the culture for a lot of us. Many of us would have chosen other paths in life had it not been for those dopamine hits provided by getting that first BASIC program working. So happy birthday BASIC!

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You Can Run BASIC On An Old HP 4592 Protocol Analyzer

April 28, 2024 by Lewin Day 10 Comments

What do you do when you find an ancient piece of test gear and want to have fun? Well, you can always try getting BASIC running on it, and that’s precisely what [David Kuder] did.

The HP4952A Protocol Analyzer actually looks a lot like an old computer, even if it was never meant for general-purpose use. The heart of the machine is a Zilog Z80 CPU, though, so it shares a lot in common with microcomputers of its era.

Among other hacks, [David] worked to get Microsoft Basic-80 running on the machine. Initially, he was only able to get it up and running on the display, with no way to read the keyboard, disk, or access the serial port. Eventually, by diving into the nitty-gritty of the machine, he was able to at least get the keyboard working along with some basic BASIC programs. Usable memory is just 8KB, but you can do a fair bit with that when you’ve only got a 32×16 display for output anyway!

It’s a neat hack and one that was extendable to the HP4957A as well. We’ve seen similar machines on these pages before, too! If you’ve got your own neat retro hacks on the boil, don’t hesitate to drop us a line!

[Thanks to Christopher Zell for the tip!]

Video Poker Takes Your Money In 10 Lines Of BASIC

March 21, 2024 by Donald Papp 14 Comments

It wasn’t easy, but [D. Scott Williamson] succeeded in implementing Jacks or Better Video Poker in 10 lines of BASIC, complete with flashing light and sound! Each round, one places a bet then plays a hand of 5-card draw, hoping to end up with Jacks or better.

This program is [Scott]’s entry into the 2024 BASIC 10 Liner Contest, which at this writing has concluded submissions and expects to announce results on April 6th 2024. Contestants may choose any 8-bit computer system BASIC, and must implement their program within ten lines of code (classically limited to 80 characters per line, but there are different categories with different constraints on line width.)

10 lines of BASIC is truly an exercise in information density.

We’ve seen impressive 10-line BASIC programs before, like this re-implementation of the E.T. video game. (Fun fact: while considered one of the worst video games of all time, there’s a compelling case to be made that while it was a flop, it was ahead of its time and mostly just misunderstood.)

These programs don’t look much like the typical BASIC programs many of us remember. They are exercises in information density, where every character counts. So we’re delighted to see [Scott] also provides a version of his code formatted and commented for better readability, and a logical overview that steps through each line.

He spends a little time talking about the various challenges, as well. For example, hand ranking required a clever solution. IF…THEN conditionals would rapidly consume the limited lines of code, so hands are ranked programmatically. The 52-card deck is also simulated, rather than simply generating random cards on the fly.

The result looks great, and you can watch it in action in the video, just under the page break. If this sort of challenge tweaks your interest, there’s plenty of time to get started on next year’s BASIC 10 Liner Contest. Fire up those emulators!

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A ZX Spectrum Raytracer, In BASIC

January 26, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 12 Comments

[Gabriel Gambetta] knows a few things about ray tracers, being the author of Tiny Raytracer, a raytracer written in just 912 bytes of JavaScript. As a long-time fellow sufferer of the UK-designed ZX Spectrum, could these two love affairs be merged? Could the Tiny Raytracer fit on the ZX Spectrum? In BASIC? The answer is an affirmative, albeit with our beloved speccy’s many limitations.

Ray tracing with only 15 primary colours

The story starts with [Gabriel]’s Computer Graphics From Scratch (CGFS) raytracer algorithms and an existing code base that was ported to the ZX Spectrum’s very limited BASIC dialect, using VSCode for editing, BAS2TAP to generate a tape image file (essentially an audio track) and executed with FUSE. With the toolchain sorted, [Gabriel] adds just enough code to deal with the ray intersection equations of a sphere, and renders a three-sphere scene to a 32×22 pixel colour image, taking a mere 15 minutes of runtime. Fellow sufferers will remember the spectrum had a 32×22 block attribute array (or colour array) with two colour values for foreground and background pixels. Each attribute block contains 8×8 pixels, each of which could be foreground (on) or background (off.) The next stage was then to expand the code to handle pixels as well as blocks, by simply expanding the raytracing to the full 256×176 resolution, and for each block simply determine the two most common colours, and run with those for the whole block. It sort of works, in a very spectrum-esq ‘attribute clash’ kind of fashion.

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BASIC In Your Browser

December 7, 2023 by Al Williams 30 Comments

If you are a certain age or just like retrocomputers, you probably have a soft spot for good old-fashioned BASIC. If you miss those days but don’t want to install a modern interpreter, you don’t have to. Just load a web page containing the “BASIC Anywhere Machine” from [CJ Veniot]. Worried about it being “in the cloud?” It isn’t? It runs in your browser, and if you are a TiddlyWiki fan, it will even live inside your Wiki, which you can host as you please.

The project has lots of features, including some integration back into TiddlyWiki, which we haven’t tried. But you can use graphics commands, work with the mouse, and do other fun things.

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