New Hampshire Installs First Historical Marker to Honor Computer Programming:
New Hampshire has installed what appears to be the first historical highway marker honoring computer programming, according to the Concord Monitor. The new sign honors BASIC, Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, a programming language that was invented at Dartmouth College in 1964.
The sign came about after Concord Monitor journalist David Brooks noted in a column that the state’s 255 historical markers honored things like bridges and historical figures, but that there was “distressingly little celebration of New Hampshire’s technical and scientific accomplishments.” He went on to advocate for the state to install a sign for BASIC and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System — a precursor to the internet. “They matter at least as much as a covered bridge,” Brooks wrote.
Two mathematicians developed the language: John G. Kemeny, and Thomas E. Kurtz, who wanted to create an easily-accessible programming language for students, and Brooks notes that BASIC “has probably has done more to introduce more people to computer programming than anything ever created.”
Thanks to their efforts, your humble scribe was first able to attempt his hand at programming back oh so many years ago. BASIC whetted my appetite and from there I learned Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL, and a whole host of other languages and assemblers. How many other Soylentils "cut their teeth" on BASIC and where did it lead you?
(Score: -1, Redundant) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @09:51PM
will be ancient history
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Monday June 17 2019, @09:57PM
FORTRAN. On punch cards. Never run a program to completion, thus I switched to BASIC - at least on microcomputers I could correct the typos immediately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday June 17 2019, @10:15PM
The Information Superhighway wasn't a literal thing, OK? Next up... we mount a historical marker inside your latest model Apple Computer saying, "Steve Jobs was born here."
This sig for rent.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by SemperOSS on Monday June 17 2019, @10:19PM (2 children)
It reminds me when I first had the opportunity to try out BASIC at the local library, one of my classmates wanted me to construct a list of all locomotive serial numbers of the country, so he could tick them off after his trainspotting. There was, apparently, a system to the serial numbers, which he told me and I then used to create the list.
Up until then I had only programmed in assembler, RPG (no, not Role Playing Games) and FORTRAN for a local mortgage institute. I actually learnt the languages in the order given, apart from BASIC which was about the same time as FORTRAN.
Sigh, those were the days.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @04:09AM (1 child)
BASIC on HP2000F - got copy of TREK73 from LBL - great game!
ASM Intel 8080, Zilog Z-80
COBOL and FORTRAN on IBM360 & punch cards
PDP11-ASM, PASCAL, FORTH
RPG, JCL/OCL/CL IBM S/34, S/32, S/3, S/38, S/36, S/23 & AS/400 including networking between all of them
ASM IBM S/32-36 including fully "taking over the OS". Intertask, Multi-way trees, Set matching
C, Sys-C, - first program communication handler (pointers->pointers->pointers)
miscellaneous versions and dialects of them al, including VB, VBA, VC, ...
Now mainly working with BASH.
(Score: 2) by SemperOSS on Tuesday June 18 2019, @08:51AM
Thanks for the reminder.
A list of the programming languages (not counting scripting languages, like bash) that I have used in "anger":
Of these, there are some I still use regularly, like Perl, PHP, C/C++, and assembler. Some of the other languages I could use fairly directly, like BASIC, FORTRAN and Algol whereas the rest probably would require some to much brushing up.
Ah, what a life.
I don't need a signature to draw attention to myself.
Maybe I should add a sarcasm warning now and again?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by stretch611 on Monday June 17 2019, @10:37PM
When I was in middle school, I was amazed and entrance the first time I saw a computer running "Lemonade Stand." It was a commodore pet computer at the time and I saw some older students stop it while it was running and generate a program listing. I knew that I wanted to program from that point on.
Shortly after, I got a commodore vic-20 for christmas... with a bonus, a 16k memory expansion as well. I still remember starting up the Vic20 and it stating "3583 bytes free." (when the 16k cartridge was removed.)
I learned BASIC while typing in the programs from "COMPUTE!" and "COMPUTE!'s Gazette." I even learned assembly language shortly after on my own while still in high school. (on the Vic20's 6502 processor of course.)
In high school, I yawned while they taught the rest of the class BASIC. They also taught LOGO (Very simple pen graphics scripting language), and Pascal.
In college, I had another Pascal class and also learned Fortran and Assembler for the Vax-11.
I later ended up at a secondary school, the chubb institute... a programming school for business. There I learned COBOL, JCL and Assembler H and was even introduced to DB2 and CICS.(The school was mainframe orientated.) I still remember all the dumbfounded faces during the assembler class... No one knew what the hell the instructor was talking about until the learned about 90% of the course material was covered and then it just started to click. Other students in the class knew I understood it all already and constantly badgered me to help them with Assembly, and I had to tell them they need to learn all the basics before any of it makes sense and they went crazy until it clicked.
Once I had my first legit job I actually had on the job training for extensive SQL/DB2 and CICS and slowly worked away from mainframes and learned C/C++, Java, HTML, Javascript, CSS, Coldfusion, and Python. (and I'm probably forgetting a few.)
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @11:37PM (1 child)
Ahhhh -- the warm childhood memories of making my 16k TRS-80 CoCo do tricks that nobody seemed to care about much except for me. It still seems like the magic we can get computers to do, the efficiency and ease with which we can simplify so many tasks that once required hard and expensive labor, is mostly taken for granted no matter how much productivity it adds. I don't remember a lot of BASIC, but if was to write something today, it might look like:
10 CLS
20 PRINT "Get off my lawn!"
30 GOTO 20
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @02:07AM
When I was young I used to go into Tandy stores, type into the basic interpreters they had running on their demo TRS-80's, then watch from a distance. (I don't remember the exact numbers so you will have to substitute the italics) :
10 For x = 1 to 10000
20 Next x
30 For y = 1 to 1000
40 A = Rand * 255
50 B = ( Rand * (amount of screen memory)) + (start value of screen memory)
60 Poke (B,A)
70 Next z
80 Goto 30
This would wait for about a minute, then draw crap all over the screen until someone typed Ctrl-C to stop it. If one of the Tandy salesdroids had been annoying me, I would add this in instead of line 80 :
80 For z = 1 to 1000
90 A = Rand * 255
100 B = Rand * (total amount of memory)
110 Poke (B,A)
120 Next z
130 GOTO 30
Probably get you arrested under CFAA these days.
(Score: 1) by jman on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:50AM
In the early 80's I hacked at many C64 games, but my favorite was Telengard, though I never could quite figure out the algorithm that determined what room would hold what object (I *think* I found the code, just didn't know how it did what it did). Would be neat to take a fresh look with older eyes...