Anyone want to buy a supercomputer?

[jon.maddog.hall@gmail.com]

My first language was FORTRAN, using punched cards on an IBM 1130 in 1969, but when I went to teach at Hartford State Technical College in 1977-1980 we used BASIC-PLUS on a DEC PDP 11/70 running RSTS/E as a time-sharing operating system.

Students in those days had no computers at home, and many typically had no computer classes in high school.   The first time they touched a computer keyboard was in my "Introduction to Computer Programming" class.

When you first logged into your RSTS/E account you were immediately talking to the BASIC-PLUS interpreter, more or less like to talk to a shell interpreter today.

READY

was the output given to you.

If you typed in the line without a line number, the line was executed immediately, so you could use it as a "calculator":

Print 5*3

would give you "15" as an answer.   If you typed in a line number at the beginning of the line it stored the command in line order:

10 Let A=3
20 Let B=5
30 Print A*B
40 END

Run

would give you the same answer, but the values of "A" and "B" would stay in memory as would the rest of the program.

With BASIC-PLUS you did not need an editor (you could use one, but you did not NEED it).   You did not have to know what a compiler was or a Linker or know how to use a fancy debugger.

Students could start writing programs (albeit sometimes crappy programs) from day 1.

On the other hand I taught a group of electrical technology students a course in how to write FORTRAN.   I was allowed eight weeks (a summer course) instead of the traditional 13 weeks.   Even I thought this was crazy, but the administration told me it had been done many times before.

The administration lied.

Most of the students just got past the stage of being able to edit, compile and link a simple program before the course was over.
So BASIC has a lot of detractors, mostly due to the infamous "GOTO".   But BASIC-PLUS also allowed you to write and call subroutines and functions.

So here is to you, BASIC!   You moved a lot of people forward.

md

> On 05/01/2024 4:04 PM EDT Jeffry Smith <jsmith at alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>  
>  
> https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/04/us-government-auctions-5-34-petaflop-cheyenne-supercomputer/
>  
>  
> Useful for running your Basic programs https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/the-basic-programming-language-turns-60/
>  
> Jeff
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