BASIC Turns 60!

As it is BASIC’s (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) Birthday, which first appeared all the way back on 1st May 1964, way before I was even thought of, since my Mum waited till 1977 to pop me out (Thanks Mum)

I thought I would do a little tribute to the language, so BASICally here it is (I see what you did there -ed)

Basic meant the world to me with easy coding,
Helped me to code “Hello World” in several different ways,
You helped me learn to do things myself,
You are so Basic, But that did not matter to me,
I always programmed silly things in Basic,
[Basic]ally I was no failure coding in you

We all probably know the “Hello World” many of us did in BASIC when we were younger, here it is for those who are not familiar with the code:

10 PRINT “HELLO WORLD”
20 GOTO 10
RUN

Yes it was that simple, and it started many off on a long journey of coding, well actually in my case, it did not, as I have never made any Games, like so many talented people out there, I just generally doodled with BASIC sadly, and never really wrote anything more complex than a Scrolling Text program on my trusty ZX Spectrum made by the Great Sir Clive Sinclair, whom I will never forget, as it was my 2nd ever computer (after the Atari 2600) which I really adored, mainly for its Games of course

When my School got a BBC Micro, that too, also came with BASIC, and I always doodled with the BBC Micro coding silly programs to show the Teacher

When I went on to learn more about computers, I even learned how to use Serial Ports, and coded a very BASIC Clocking In Machine, which used Card with punched out holes, which would then send a 01101011 type sequence back to the computer, and would then log the card insert, along with the time and date

Sadly I have no source code for any of the things I coded, it was many years ago, and I have sadly lost the Floppy Disks I stored my code on, since that was the only way to store data back in the day

BASIC appeared on many Computers back in the day, and the ones I used were Sinclair BASIC (ZX Spectrum), Commodore BASIC (C64), BBC BASIC (BBC Micro) and Quick BASIC (MS-DOS)

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You can find out more about BASIC over on Wikipedia

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