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Re:QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64 by dspillett on Friday February 23, 2018 @12:30PM (#16447774)
I cut my programming teeth in BBC Basic, which was a much better language than that found on many other 8-bit micros of the time. No silly 2-character variable names limit (IIRC it respected up to 40 characters), proper named procedures and functions so you could program with some structure (some 9-bits BASICs' had little more than GOTO <line> and GOSUB <line>, with BBC Basic and very little jiggery-pokery you could program without line numbers at all), and a built-in multi-pass assembler (which I played with for various tricks like sprites and a bit of playing with integer fractal calculations for trippy graphics).

I used QuickBasic later (QBasic was essentially QuickBasic without the compiler and a few other features cut out) and many other things since.

Re:QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64 by jcadam on Friday February 23, 2018 @01:12PM (#16448089)
Amiga AMOS was my favorite "BASIC." They even sold an optional compiler :)

By the time we got a PC, Visual Basic was a thing. It just wasn't the same anymore :( Motivated me to move on to C.

Re:QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64 by kerng on Friday February 23, 2018 @09:46PM (#16451340)
Oh AMOS- thanks for the reminder. I had totally forgotten about it. It was really incredible for game development. I remember working on a Mario jump and run clone for a while to learn game development. It was a really great environment.
Re:QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64 by sshagent on Friday February 23, 2018 @12:53PM (#16447950)
This was pretty much my route too. BBC Basic (Albeit on an Acorn Electron). Whilst my friends we're rocking the much "cooler" Spectrums, i didn't have people to swap games with so got my interest in programming there. Is interesting how parents decisions to buy the "wrong" computer got me started in the right direction.
Re:QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64 by vram22 on Friday February 23, 2018 @03:01PM (#16448966)
The BBC computer with BBC BASIC was good. I used it some; I didn't have one, I used the one in the British Library in Chennai (Madras), from where I also got tons of good computer books to read, over some years while in college. (I used to max out the four-book allowance and borrow that many at a time to take home to read :) Apart from supporting just BASIC programs, it had the feature of allowing you to drop down to inline 6502 assembly language, just by including all the assembly language statements between square brackets, one statement per line.

I also used a few other micros like the Apple II, the Commodore 64 and the IBM PC Jr. for a while.

Here is one post I wrote about it:

Lissajous hippo, retrocomputing and the IBM PC Jr.:

https://jugad2.blogspot.in/2012/09/lissajous-hippo.html

Re:QuickBASIC Lives on with QB64 by dspillett on Monday February 26, 2018 @11:41AM (#16466602)
I also started on an Electron too, though we later got a juicier Master 128.