Learning BASIC Like It's 1983

Re:Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 by gaius on Monday September 03, 2018 @04:10AM (#17901194)

As someone who was there and did that I want to refute that assumption :) I have typed in many programs and there's not a lot to learn because most of them consisted of many pages of DATA lines and a small loop that loaded those machine instructions into the home computer's memory and started the program by a USR directive

On the Beeb most listings were BASIC with all the logic there and DATA statements just for in-game assets such as sprites or room descriptions in a text adventure. All the Osbourne books are online now , check them out https://www.raspberrypi-spy.co.uk/2016/02/usborne-releases-1... many happy memories inside!

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Re:Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 by pdjstone on Monday September 03, 2018 @04:40AM (#17901310)

For more 80's microcomputer BASIC nostalgia, there's also INPUT magazine (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_(magazine)). I spent hours and hours as a kid poring through those magazines. Archive.org has the entire series as PDFS - https://archive.org/details/inputmagazine. They were really good at explaining core programming concepts and the illustrations were also amazing.

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Re:Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 by pmyteh on Monday September 03, 2018 @07:02AM (#17901814)

BBC BASIC had a built-in inline assembler, which I think also made things easier for people typing in at home. Even if the program dropped to assembly language for speed, the instructions were still human-readable rather than DATA statements full of raw hex.

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