Back to BASICs — Hello, World!

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FREEWARE SPOTLIGHT By Deanna McElveen My mom ran the media center at my school when I was a teen, and she happened to have control of a coveted person
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fisher75, abbodi86, Casey S, tom m, DLivesInTexas, Pim

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I loved your article. My favorite Basic is Visual Basic 6.0. It’s the last Basic compiler that does not require Visual Studio. You write your program, debug it, compile it and it produces an .exe file that can run on any windows machine. It is rich with features and can even access the registry. I’ve written hundreds of programs with it including Tournament Golf and multiple Video Poker programs. I have acquired multiple Visual Basic 6.0 manuals and guides that provide all the documentation that I need. It is still available as a free download.

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Deanna McElveen

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I’ve just got to say – every time I see Deanna’s avatar pic on the newsletter, it makes me smile. I love the pic.

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Deanna McElveen, tom m

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Some nostalgia.  When I was a wee lad, my grandfather was a professional tax preparer.  He acquired a Leading Edge Model D (fancy IBM XT compatible) PC for doing all that tax preparation stuff for clients.

Being a wise and sage grandfather, he realized the future potential computers would have, and bought each grandchild a Commodore 64.  I think I was about 10 years old at the time.

Grandpa was a member of a local computer group/club/association (I don’t recall the exact nomenclature they went by).  One of the things they had were lots and lots of freeware and shareware programs written in BASIC.

Whenever I visited grandpa, I would play the various shareware and freeware apps he had.  When I found one I enjoyed, I would print out the entire BASIC programing code on his trusty old (new at the time) dot matrix printer.

Now, IBM BASIC and Commodore BASIC aren’t simply drop in and go.  I would enter the lines and lines of the IBM BASIC code in my Commodore 64.  Once entered, I would save the code and try to run it.

When it failed, and it always failed, I would track down the line(s) of code causing the problem.  I would then find the equivalent Commodore BASIC commands to perform the same function.   I was so proud of myself when my slot machine, Oregon Trail, and Monopoly games from IBM BASIC would finally run on my Commodore 64.

And that’s about as far as I went down the path of becoming a programmer.  Nonetheless, it was an educational and entertaining experience.   I think it also gave me the knack for troubleshooting anything and everything computer-related at a relatively young age.

Now, I’m just a grumpy old Systems Administrator who pictures current batches of programmers as 1,000 monkeys with 1,000 typewriters.  Instead of creating the works of Shakespeare in 1,000 years, they’re endlessly churning out Swiss-cheese software, with security holes big enough to drive a Mac truck through…

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zat_so

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That brought back memories!  My first exposure to a home computer was a TI-99/4A that my mother won on Wheel of Fortune (back when the Wheel gave out prizes instead of cash).  I was visiting my mother and I asked her if I could borrow the still-unopened TI-99/4A.  I took it home, learned BASIC, and never looked back.  I even purchased the Peripheral Expansion Box for it. I then ran a home business on the TI.  Within two years, having bumped up to the limitations of the TI, I bought an IBM PC.  I went back to school (at night),  and switched careers to development work in IT.  I just retired after more than forty years of a career that was kicked off by that TI-99/4A.  My family and I joke that my mother’s appearance on Wheel of Fortune changed my life (for the better)!  Thanks for jogging my memory!

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I think I made this comment somewhere here before, but I had a successful 33 year career devoloping in BASIC. General accounting, order entry, inventory, financials, payroll, manufacturing floor applications, and much more. Nothing wrong with BASIC.

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